What happened to the Fiorentino, the great yellow diamond owned by the Medici family?
The enigma, which has now spanned centuries and dynasties, was born a century ago, during the First World War when the huge gem (it was said to weigh something like 138 carats!) lost its traces in Switzerland, in what is now the territory of the Canton ticino.
The diamond of Indian origin, which had a singular pale yellow color with a slight greenish vein, was worked in the grand-ducal workshops by an expert Venetian goldsmith, Pompeo Studentoli, and then mounted as a pendant with a golden snake frame studded with small diamonds.
He arrived at the court of the Medici after a battle. One of the many legends about the diamond tells, in fact, that it was cut at the behest of the last Duke of Burgundy, Charles the Bold, who wore it in the battle in which he was mortally wounded, in Morat in 1476.
The wonderful stone ended, as if it were a simple object to be a junk dealer, in the hands of Bartholomeus Mayus, a citizen of Bern, who sold it to some Genoese merchants, up to the court of Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan, and Julius II, the patron pope of Michelangelo and Raphael. The diamond arrived in the coffers of some bankers and then in the treasury of the Medici in Florence.
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But this isn't the only version of the troubled story of the mysterious gem. Another legend tells that the diamond was bought by Ludovico Castro, Count of Montesanto, Portuguese governor of Goa, from an Indian king, defeated in battle. The stone was then deposited in Rome, in custody by the Jesuits, until the Grand Duke of Tuscany Ferdinando I de' Medici bought it from the Castro-Noranha family for 35 thousand shields.
In any case, before its disappearance, it was cut into a double rosette with nine sides, with 126 veneers and with a total weight of about 137.27 carats (equal to 27,454 grams).
At the end of the seventeenth century, when the last of the Medici died, the diamond passed to the imperial family of Austria (the Florentine appears in the portraits of Mary Magdalene of Austria who loved to show it off on great occasions inserted in tiaras of pearls and precious stones). The gem was then placed together with the other imperial crown jewels in the Hofburg in Vienna.
After the fall of the Austrian Empire, during the First World War, the family, as mentioned, took him with them into exile in Switzerland. But its location after the Swiss stay is unknown, although someone ventures that it was hidden near Mendrisio.
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Some think that, precisely in those years, it was stolen by someone close to the family (perhaps an unfaithful servant), while others theorize that the diamond - which became too cumbersome and, above all, unsellable because of its astronomical commercial value - was broken down into smaller stones and then sold to wealthy goldsmiths of Jewish origin. Some suspect that it was cut out into what is now known as the Yellow Tiffany, one of the most famous colored diamonds in the world, but there is no evidence about it.
Between suspicion and oblivion, however, there is no longer a trace of the famous Florentine. Among the curiosities, we remember that the jewel has also become the protagonist of a novel entitled "The Curse of the Florentine Diamond", by Rolf Ackermann, a story that skillfully plays between mystery, seduction and adventure.