Unforgettable In Every Way

How Ginevra de'Benci Beat The Reaper and Became Immortal-- Part 1 of a Series

She can sometimes be seen in that middle upstairs window

Little Girl Lost

At the main intersection of my leafy green town stands a sandstone and wooden structure that has housed the local bank for as long as anyone can remember. 

Remember... because global pandemonia dealt a deathblow to its core business which had been in long decline-- a quaint practice called in-person banking.

The building is empty now except for a young girl who has lived on its second floor ever since it was converted from apartments into storerooms for financial documents and office equipment.

No one has ever seen her, but at night you can hear her, dashing gaily back and forth upstairs, trailing wisps muffled laughter.

I know that because, over the past twenty years, two of the bank's managers have told me so with a straight face.

Both times I was in their offices after work to sign off on loans. Everyone else was gone; only the manager was there. The branch didn't have evening hours anymore, they explained. They were concerned customers might become uncomfortable if they learned the place was haunted.

At least some employees felt differently. They would leave toys upstairs so the ghost wouldn't turn the documents into playthings. From the preference for dolls they guessed that the spirit was a young girl.

Still, the branch needed business. So I encouraged the second bank manager who told me this story to run a Halloween loan sale.  Have applicants come down in person and sign up during evening hours, I said. Anyone who heard the ghost would get a half point off on their interest. She smiled and told me it would never fly with legal.

A year later, the branch closed for good.  Now the town is trying to buy the property and move town hall into the premises.  The mayor thinks it's a great idea, but municipal workers are less than convinced.     

Former head offices of Medici Bank, now the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy. She can sometimes be seen in that middle second floor window

Hiding in Plain Sight

There's another abandoned bank with a girl upstairs-- angel, apparition, or algorithm… you decide.

The bank, which was the combined BlackRock, JP Morgan Chase and HSBC of its day,  has been defunct since 1499, assets long ago liquidated, buildings long repurposed. All that remains is a young girl who lives on through some of the most enduring imaginations and endearing creations funded by its fantastic wealth.  

She shows up every hundred years or so, hiding in plain sight, but plainly visible to the men she pursues, blessing them beyond imagination, sometimes for merely glancing her way.

Woman with Flowers, by Andrea del Verrochio, circa 1475, model believed to be Ginevra de’Benci

Sold… To The Lowest Bidder

I have written at length in these pages of Ginevra de’Benci (1457- 1520), the It Girl of Renaissance Italy. Rome may be the country's spiritual center, but Florence is its cultural capital, courtesy of the Medici family, bankers to all the known world at the time. 

The Benci fortune was amassed by Ginevra's grandfather, manager of the Medici Bank who oversaw twenty years of record profits until his death in 1455.  The wealth he passed along enabled his eldest son Amerigo to marry well, leaving a son Giovanni to carry on the family name, and a daughter Ginevra to bag a high-value (read "Medici") catch, just in time for his premature death in 1468 at age thirty-four.

By all accounts, Giovanni was a man about town. And his knockout kid sister Nevvy was an A-lister on the Florentine party circuit, when she was suddenly and inexplicably married off at sixteen for $1.5 million in today's currency to a lowly cloth merchant and widower twice her age named Luigi Niccolini. 

Scholars have theorized that the custodian of the Benci estate (her Uncle Bartolomeo?) may have so bungled his fiduciary duties that the family could no longer afford a Medici dowry. There is just not enough there there  to explain how things could have otherwise so declined over six years. Or maybe Bart and Luigi were drinking buddies and struck a deal in their cups?  We will never know.

We do know that their union was private-- a winter's day ceremony at the Benci Palazzo on January 15, 1474-- the only date in Ginevra's life we are sure of. 

And we know it was without issue. Bride locked groom out of the bedroom, refusing to take his name or produce his heir, malingering for the doctors until he finally passed on in 1505.  

On the street where she lived, at Number 16

The Verse That Picks The Lock

All this as Ginevra was becoming iconic for being iconic.