The Martelli traced their origin through two lines of ancestry: to the Picciandoni of Pisa in the thirteenth century, and to the Stabbielli of the Val di Sieve in the fourteenth. They appear to have settled in the Via degli Spadai, and to have "hammered" among the armourers there, so successfully, that their name was given to the street in lieu of its more ancient designation. Messer Domenico, Cammilla's great-grandfather, was one of Savonarola's keenest opponents, chiefly in the interests of the Medici, and the great Cosimo counted him among his most trusty friends, but he suffered for his fidelity by being assassinated in 1531, by one Paolo del Nero. Another relative of Cammilla died tragically, Lodovico, who was killed by Giovanni Bandini in a duel at Poggio Baroncelli in 1530--a duel fought for the hand and heart of the beauteous Marietta de' Ricci, a relative of that other fateful flirt, Cassandra, who was the cause of Pietro Buonaventuri's tragic death, and died by the knives of assassins. The Martelli were associated with many of the pious works of the Medici: for example, they assisted munificently in the building and endowment of the great church of San Lorenzo. In some way or other Messer Antonio had lit on evil days, at all events he appears to have lost the banking business, which had been mainly operative in the raising of his house, and had reverted to the less lucrative but still honourable occupation of his family--the craft of sword-making. He carried on his business in a house which he rented under the shadow of the Palazzo Pitti. Both Cammilla and her elder sister Maria were good-looking girls. The latter, in 1566, married a wealthy shoemaker from Siena, Gaspare Chinucci, but her husband divorced her; and then Duke Cosimo caused her father to marry her, in 1572, to an opulent foreign merchant--Messer Baldassarre Suarez, who had come over from Spain and was a protégé of the Duchess Eleanora. Cammilla, born in 1547, possessed all the personal attractiveness which distinguished her mother, whose sister, Nannina, the wife of Messer Luigi degli Albizzi, was mother of Eleanora, Duke Cosimo's _druda_. "Tall and of a good figure, fair complexion, with light hair, and a pair of dark eyes like two brilliant stars, she was also most graceful in her carriage and manner, full of intelligence in conversation, and quite naturally fond of admiration and amours." This is a contemporary word-picture of the physical and mental charms of one of the most lovely girls that ever tripped merrily along the Lung' Arno Acciaiuoli--in the footsteps of Beatrice de' Portinari.