level of the marshes of Fucecchio, lies the large Villa Montefalcone, which came into the possession of the family in the second half of the fourteenth century. It was formerly a castle (destroyed by Castruccio) with a splendid view over the valley, strewn with villages lying mostly on low hills, and the beautiful wooded heights of Monte Albano, behind which the fertile Pistojan plain joined the Florentine valley of the Arno, which, while more varied, rivalled it in fertility. Maso degli Albizzi died in 1417, aged seventy-four. His eldest son, Rinaldo, was the heir to his position in the Senate. He was a boy eight years of age when his relations fell in the tumult of Ciompi, had grown up in the traditions of his house, and from the year 1399 was active in affairs of State. No citizen was employed so much as he in embassies and commissions of all kinds. We meet with him in great and small matters; for the statesmen of the free city as little thought of declining small matters, as the greatest artists thought it beneath their dignity to paint shields and domestic implements, or to carve coats of arms on door-posts and chimney-pieces. Fifty different commissions were entrusted to Rinaldo, some in the vicinity, and some to the Popes, King Sigismund, to Naples, Lombardy, Genoa, Ferrara, Romagna, &c. The hard-working man left careful and detailed notes of all, which, with the documents and letters relating thereto, he first collected in 1423, and afterwards continued. They are models of a natural, pure, perspicuous, and always appropriate diction, at a time when the Tuscan dialect was threatened with an overgrowth of learned affectation and distortion, and was losing its popular simplicity. These notes are a source of the amplest knowledge of details for any one who earnestly studies the history of this period, remarkable in so many ways.[58] While he was so frequently employed in foreign service—for the year before his exile we find him at Rome—his opponents laboured at home for his ruin. It is as if Gino Capponi, Neri’s son, had thought of him when he wrote the advice intended for his son: ‘He who wishes for a great position in his native city, should not leave it too often, except in important cases.’ ‘Messer Rinaldo,’ says Giovanni Cavalcanti, a contemporary and adherent of the Medici, ‘knew not what fear is. He had clean hands, was well read in the sciences, was full of perseverance and love of justice, so that the multitude accused him of being hard and cruel. He lived only on simple fare, and hated feastings, and was accustomed to say that he who wished to keep in health must be no gormandizer; which his enemies interpreted as meanness. Would to God that we could not have said of this man that he was proud! for else he would have excelled many others in good qualities. But his pride clouded his own virtues, and misjudged those of others.’[59]