The stately Villa delle Selve, built by Buontalenti, stands high on the crest of a hill overlooking the Arno below Signa about nine miles from Florence. The first mention of it is in the archives of the monastery of San Pier Maggiore where it is stated that the Commune of Florence, in the interest of the creditors of the Acciajuoli bank, sold “a podere with a hut, a brick kiln, etc., at a place called Le Selve in the parish of San Martino a Gangalandi for 270 golden florins.” It afterwards came into the possession of the Strozzi. And when Filippo Strozzi and his wife Clarice left Rome by stealth and sailed to Pisa, a messenger met them with letters from the Cardinal of Cortona and from Niccolò Capponi urging them to come to Florence, so Filippo, a prudent Florentine “decided,” writes old Varchi, “after much meditation not to be the one who, as the saying is, picks the chestnuts out of the fire, but determined to send Madonna Clarice on to feel the way; she being a woman and a Medici would, he conceived, not run the same risk as himself.... Clarice, as courageous as she was proud, accepted the commission without waiting to be entreated, and leaving Piero and Vincenzio her sons, in Empoli under the charge of their tutor Ser Francesco Zeffi, she went accompanied by only Antonio da Barberino and Maestro Marcantonio da San Gemignano to dine at Le Selve near Signa, a most favourite villa of Filippo’s and from thence the same evening proceeded to Florence.” Marchese Filippo di Averardo Salviati bought the villa from the Strozzi and in 1611 lent it to his friend Galileo Galilei, who unfortunately for himself had resigned his professorship at Padua to accept the appointment of court mathematician in Florence. It is a curious fact that two of the greatest of Italians, Giovanni Boccaccio and Galileo Galilei, had a common ancestor in Bonajuto, Lord of Pogna in the Val d’Elsa. Bonajuto’s son Chellino was grandfather to Boccaccio; another son, Giovanni, was the father of a celebrated doctor Maestro Galileo from whom descended Vincenzio Galilei, a musician of some repute and author of a dialogue on music printed in Florence in 1581, he married Giulia Ammanati, and their son—the famous Galileo—was born in Pisa in 1564. A descendant of a third son of old Maestro Galileo was governor of Pisa in 1837 and most bitterly resented any allusion to his relationship with a man who had been in the prisons of the Inquisition. The arms of the two families are identical, save that the red ladder of the Galilei is placed vertically on a gold ground while that of the Chellini is diagonal.[77]