After the Pazzi conspiracy and the murder of Giuliano in 1476, Lorenzo sent his wife Clarice with the children and their tutor Angelo Poliziano to Cafaggiuolo for safety. Poliziano wrote to Lucrezia, who had remained in Florence with her son: “Magnifica Domina mea. The news I can send from here is that we are all well, that we have so much and such continual rain that we cannot quit the house, and that we have exchanged hunting for playing at ball, so that the children may not want for exercise.... I remain in the house by the fireside in my slippers and greatcoat, and you would take me for melancholy in person could you see me; but perhaps I am but myself after all, for I neither do nor see nor hear anything that amuses me, so much have I taken to heart our calamities; sleeping and waking they haunt me. Two days since we began to spread our wings as we heard the plague had ceased, now we are again depressed on learning that things are not yet quite settled with you. When at Florence we have some consolation—if nought else that of seeing Lorenzo return home safe. Here we are always anxious about everything; and as for myself, I declare to you I am drowned in weary laziness for the solitude in which I find myself. I say solitude, because Monsignore [probably the Bishop of Arezzo] shuts himself up in his room, where I find him sorrowful and full of thought, so that being with him increases my own melancholy; Ser Alberto del Malherba mumbles offices all day long with the children; I remain alone, and when tired of studying ring the changes on plague and war, on sorrow for the past and fear for the future, and have no one with whom to air these my phantasies. I do not find my Madonna Lucrezia here to whom I can unbosom myself and I am dying of weariness.... I commend myself unto you. Ex Cafasolo, die 18 dicembris 1478. Your servant Angelus.” Poliziano was no favourite with the proud and unlettered Clarice, and he complained to Lorenzo about Giovanni (afterwards Pope Leo X): “His mother sets him to read the Psalter, of which I do not approve. When she does not interfere with him he makes most wonderful progress.” It ended by Clarice sending away Poliziano and engaging a priest to superintend her son’s studies. Before his birth she dreamed that she was delivered of a huge but docile lion, and his father always destined him for the Church. Soon after he was seven he received the tonsure and was declared capable of ecclesiastical preferment; whereupon the King of France made him abbot of Fonte-dolce, an appointment rapidly followed by so many others that, after enumerating them all, old Fabroni in his life of Leo X exclaims: “Bone Deus, quot in uno juvene cumulata sacerdotia.”