I hope it's germane, but seeing as we are political junkies, I figured posting my comic about the father of political science wouldn't be a breach of etiquette. Hope you like it.
Here are the first three pages of chapter one and this gets us up to date. From here on out, weekly two-page updates.
To see the pages posted so far, it's probably easiest to go to my profile page or my web site.
Footnotes below the fold:
Footnotes
Intro page: The diary of Luca Landucci is out of print and hard to find, but well worth a trip to the library if getting into microscopic detail of events in Renaissance Florence is your cup of tea. It’s of particular interest because Landucci writes relatively little about his personal life in his journal: but he writes a lot about current events and his reactions to them. I use Luca to fill us in on key events—the entry of the French into Florence and their exit, and the death of Savonarola—that occur in the years between the Pazzi Conspiracy and our eponymous hero’s entry onto our stage.
Page 1: The Palazzo della Signoria—or Palazzo Vecchio as it is known today—looks much the same now as it did in 1499, with two notable exceptions: no clock (17th century), and Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes is in the spot where we are accustomed to seeing Michelangelo’s David. In 1499, Michelangelo had not yet started the David, but it was not far off: 1504.