They met in the long gallery of the Uffizi, both standing before the same Botticelli — neither speaking, both entirely certain the other was wrong about it. Alessandro thought the painting melancholy. Isabella thought it transcendent. They argued for forty minutes and then had dinner.

Three years of letters, visits, and the slow accumulation of shared reference points — the same obscure wine, the same preference for reading in silence, the same belief that candlelight improves almost everything — led, inevitably, to this: a betrothal announced beneath the autumn frescoes of Villa Medici, with the cypress trees as witnesses.