Antonio and his Florentine relatives must have led a merry life in their delectable duchy. In the family correspondence we find allusions to hawking and partridge shooting; and the ducal stable provided good mounts for the young Italians who scoured the plains of Attica and Bœotia in quest of game. The cultured Florentines were delighted with Athens and the Akropolis. “You have never seen,” wrote Nicolò Machiavelli to one of his cousins, “a fairer land nor yet a fairer fortress than this.” It was there, in the venerable Propylaia, that Antonio had fixed his ducal residence. No great alterations were required to convert the classic work of Mnesikles into a Florentine palace. All that the Acciajuoli seem to have done was to cut the two vestibules in two so as to make four rooms, to fill up the spaces between the pillars with walls—removed so recently as 1835—and to add a second storey, the joist-sockets of which are still visible, to both that building and the Pinakotheke, which either then, or in the Turkish times, was crowned with battlements. To the Florentine dukes is also usually ascribed the construction of the square “Frankish tower,” which stood opposite the Temple of Nike Apteros till it was pulled down in 1874 by one of those acts of pedantic barbarism which considers one period of history alone worthy of study, instead of regarding every historical monument as a precious landmark in the evolution of a nation. We can well believe that the Florentine watchman from the projecting turret daily swept sea and land in all directions, save where the massive cathedral of Our Lady shut out part of Hymettos from his view; and at night the beacon-fire kindled on the summit warned Akrocorinth of the approach of Turkish horsemen or rakish-looking galleys. Nor did the Italians limit their activity as builders to the castle-crag alone. Chalkokondyles expressly says that Antonio’s long and peaceful administration enabled him to beautify the city. There is evidence that the dukes possessed a beautiful villa at the spring of Kallirrhoe, and that close by they were wont to pray in the church of St Mary’s-on-the-rock, once a temple of Triptolemos. More than two centuries later a French ambassador heard mass in this church; and one of his companions found the lion rampant and the three lilies of the Florentine bankers, which visitors to the famous Certosa know so well, still guarding—_auspicium melioris ævi_—the entrance of the Turkish bazaar[111].