The fine palace now inhabited by the Baroness Ricasoli Firidolfi and her children was built by the Ridolfi family on the site of houses belonging to various families, in the XVth century, and bought in 1736 by Maria Lucrezia Firidolfi for her sons. The architect is unknown, but the palace, with its fine courtyard, evidently dates from the XVth century. On the first floor is a tiny chapel, entirely painted in oils by Giorgio Vasari in a manner very different from his usual style. Above the altar is a marble bas-relief of the Madonna and Child with S. John, by Rossellini. The history of this family is a complicated and a curious one. Divided in the XIIth century into three branches, of which one retained the old name of Firidolfi, whilst the other two took that of Ricasoli, they were again reunited after eight hundred years in the person of the late Baron Giovanni Ricasoli Firidolfi. His mother was the only daughter of the great statesman Baron Bettino Ricasoli, his father the sole surviving son of Giovanni Francesco Ricasoli di Meleto, who married the only daughter of the last of the Firidolfi, whose name he added to his own. One of those long-bearded northmen (Longobardi), who came into Italy in the VIth century, is said to have settled in the Mugello. But the first of the family of whom we have documentary evidence is Geremia, son of Ildebrando, lord of great estates in the Mugello and of nearly the whole province of the Chianti, who being old, and without children, made large donations to the Church. On the death of his first wife he married a young girl, by whom he had one son, Ridolfo, inscribed among the great Barons of Tuscany in a deed of 1029. From him the family took the name of Firidolfi (de filiis Rudolphi). Ranieri Firidolfi fought under Frederick Barbarossa, and obtained in fief the castles of Campi and of Tornano, and, according to a tradition in the family, the strong castle of Brolio. This originally belonged to Bonifazio, Marquess of Tuscany, who in 1009 gave it to the monks of the Badia of Florence, a donation confirmed by the Emperor Henry II. in 1012, and by Henry IV. in 1074. Henry VI. not only confirmed his father’s gifts to Ranieri, but added to them the castles of Moriano and of Ricasoli, not far from Fiesole, from which the most powerful branch of the family took its name.