The Palazzo of Innocenzo “the Invisible” de Medici is a grand private residence in Florence, designed around a domed rotunda and richly ornamented with architectural and painted imagery. In Rabo Karabekian’s account, its layered spaces are more than a setting: the palazzo is where he finds Marilee Kemp again, and its later appearance in a published guide makes a once-inaccessible private world newly visible to outsiders.

Architecture and Setting

The palazzo was designed by Leon Battista Alberti in the middle of the fifteenth century. Its cruciform plan has four wings meeting a domed rotunda twelve meters in diameter. Eighteen Corinthian columns, each four and a half meters high, are partly embedded in the rotunda’s walls; above them, a clerestory has thirty-six windows. The dome bears a painted vision of God, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and angels looking down through clouds, attributed to Paolo Uccello. The terrazzo floor, whose designer is unknown but thought by Rabo likely to have been Venetian, depicts peasants planting and harvesting, cooking and baking, and making wine.

This inventory of dimensions, artists, and decoration comes not from Rabo presenting himself as an expert, but from a recently published book on private art treasures in Tuscany. Its author, Kim Bum Suk, was a South Korean political exile whose book grew out of a doctoral thesis in architectural history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The publication records interiors of private homes that had rarely been examined by scholars and whose art had not previously been photographed by an outsider or entered into a public catalogue.

Private Ownership and Public Visibility

The palace had remained uninterruptedly in private hands for five and a half centuries. In the book’s account, Marilee, Contessa Portomaggiore, had given Kim Bum Suk and his camera and measuring instruments access to the property. That access creates an important contrast: a house defined by generations of privacy becomes documented and visible to a public readership, while remaining privately owned.

After Marilee’s death, ownership passed to her late husband’s nearest male blood relative, a second cousin who was an automobile dealer in Milan. He promptly sold the palazzo to an Egyptian man described as a mystery figure and believed to be an arms dealer. Rabo’s account then reveals that the new owner, Leo Mamigonian, was the son of Vartan Mamigonian, the man who had diverted Rabo’s parents from Paris to San Ignacio and was connected to the loss of Rabo’s eye. The palace’s succession thus brings a distant architectural history into contact with Rabo’s own family history.

Rabo and Marilee at the Palazzо

Thirty-seven years before recounting the palazzo’s recent ownership, Rabo had entered it himself. When he telephoned Marilee from his hotel, she invited him to tea an hour later; the palace was only four blocks away. He arrived in a self-conscious, excited state, wearing an eye patch and warning her beforehand that he was married, though his marriage was in difficulty. His recollection turns the approach into a passage through a controlled household: a female servant led him along a long, straight corridor to the edge of the rotunda, and another servant ordered him to stop just inside it.

Marilee stood at the center of the rotunda, dressed in black mourning for her husband, Count Bruno. The palace’s formal geometry and the servants’ disciplined welcome set the stage for a reunion charged by the history between the visitors, without reducing the scene to architecture alone. The building is at once a private residence with its own rules of access and the space in which Rabo and Marilee confront their shared past.

The Palazzo in the Book’s Larger Pattern of Space

The palace’s history of restricted access resonates with the novel’s other thresholds between private property and public encounter. Rabo’s own waterfront house in East Hampton came to him through his marriage to Edith Taft, and he describes himself there as the keeper of a major private collection of Abstract Expressionist paintings. Its entrance hall, redesigned by Edith to display the collection, was featured in an architecture magazine as the prelude to the art in the rooms beyond. After Edith’s death, Rabo’s sealed, windowless potato-barn studio remained another deliberately inaccessible space, until he eventually opened it to visitors.

That later opening changes the function of the barn: it becomes part of the regular museum tour, with visitors entering at one end and leaving through the other, sometimes making repeated passes. Rabo describes the barn’s large work as a tourist attraction rather than a painting, while noting that ordinary visitors find it compelling. Read alongside the palazzo’s inclusion in a public book, this change makes visibility a recurring question in the novel: who can enter, who can see, and what changes when private spaces are made available to an audience. The palazzo remains privately owned, but its documented interiors and its place in Rabo’s memory give it a public life as both architectural record and setting for a personal reunion.