Parks - Medici Money

Medici Money

Lucky for Italy that Tim Parks decided to live there and write about his new home. His acute sense of people and history now comes to a grand fruition in his tome on the Medici, a gift to anyone who has been dazzled by Florence. Splendid reading. Frances Mayes, author of Under the Tuscan Sun

Witty and penetrating Parks deftly unravels these complexities, illustrating both their benefits and the pitfalls with illuminating detail [he] recounts the Medicis story with an infectious enthusiasm. His own conjuring trick is to tell this grand saga, with all its chicanery, in a clear and lucid style. Martin Baker, Sunday Telegraph

Parks, who is sceptical about bankers, writes about them with pace, wit and some passion. Economist

The story-telling is wonderful. Parks brings a novelists flair to his task and comes out as a hip and snappy narrator wit, elegance and intelligence He has an infallible eye for interesting anecdote Medici Money marks a marriage of the banking history of the Medici and the familys political shenanigans that has never before been attempted For those who liked to be gripped by the past Tim Parks has surpassed himself and produced a thoroughly readable book on the Medici. Independent on Sunday

He is master of the historic present, carrying us through events with the excitement of a live observer. David, Abulafia, Times Literary Supplement

A book which is as lively as it is learned. Scotsman

TIM PARKS is the author of eleven novels, including Europa (shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Destiny and Rapids. He has also written three accounts of life in northern Italy, two collections of essays and many translations of Italian writers. He lives in Italy.

ATLAS

The books in the Atlas series will explore entrepreneurship, greed, finance, business, economics over the centuries.

Published titles

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Adam Smith

Rich Cohen

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Tim Parks

Medici Money:

Banking, Metaphysics and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence

Forthcoming titles

Richard Rayner

California Capitalists:

the Big Four and the making of California

BY TIM PARKS

Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence

Tim Parks

This paperback edition published in 2006

First published in Great Britain in 2005 by
Profile Books Ltd
3A Exmouth House
Pine Street
Exmouth Market
London EC1R 0JH
www.profilebooks.com

First published in the United States in 2005 by
Atlas Books/W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Copyright Tim Parks, 2005, 2006

7 9 10 8 6

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-10 1 86197 757 3
ISBN-13 978 1 86197 757 1