Varchi, whose admiration for Poggio a Cajano was great, tells us “the Medici, that is the Cardinal and Ippolito and Alessandro left Florence on Friday the 17th day of May 1527 at 18 o’clock, accompanied by Count Piero Noferi and many others, (there were many who said, as the company rode down Via Larga, which was crowded with people, that they would one day repent letting them depart alive,) and went full of fear to Poggio a Cajano, their villa of marvellous size and magnificence.... Hardly had the Medici left Florence than the people rushed to rob their houses, and only with great difficulty could Niccolò [Capponi] and other good men hold them back and save the houses; and the next day (when, without knowing who set the rumour about, news spread that the Pope had come out of Castel Sant’ Angelo) people said that the Medici with a goodly following of foot and horse were returning to re-enter Florence, and Lodovico Martelli publicly affirmed under the Loggia de’ Signori that from his place Le Gore they had been seen at Careggi, their villa two miles outside Florence, and although (not so much because he was a Martelli, who are generally held to be untrustworthy, as because he was looked on as the sworn follower of his brother-in-law Luigi Ridolfi) small reliance was placed on his word, nevertheless in a few hours, this being repeated by one to the other and by the other to another, there arose a great hubbub in Florence and the shops (this by now had become a daily custom) and doors were closed. News of the rising was taken by Nibbio, who spurred by fear left Florence in hot haste and returned to Poggio to the Cardinal and the Magnificent, besides which friends wrote to warn them and enemies to frighten them, that Piero Salviati was preparing to start with two hundred cross-bowmen on horseback; all these things so alarmed the Cardinal that he, with all the others, left at once ... and went to Pistoja.” There were great doings at Poggio a Cajano on the 24th July 1539 when Cosimo I and his bride Eleonora of Toledo spent five days there on their way from Pisa to Florence. Twenty-six years later their son Francesco de’ Medici met his bride, Joan of Austria, at the same place, where some time afterwards he died together with his second wife the infamous Bianca Cappello. Little did the poor Arch-Duchess think that the beautiful villa, where she first met her affianced husband, was to become the favourite residence of the handsome and dissolute Venetian, who rendered her life intolerable, and was suspected of poisoning her only son. In 1578 Joan died, and on her deathbed entreated her husband to give up his mistress. Sobbing he swore he would never see her again, but two months afterwards, on the 5th June 1578, Francesco I, was secretly married to Bianca Cappello (her husband having been conveniently murdered some little time before) in the private chapel of Palazzo Vecchio.