Frescobaldi

From an early economic base in the Italian community of cloth merchants in Bruges, the Frescobaldi expanded their banking interests to their home city of Florence in the 13th century.

As bankers, the Frescobaldi financed ventures for numerous members of European royal families, notably their financial conquest of England, which Fernand Braudel has signalled as the greatest achievement of the Florentine firms, "not only in holding the purse-strings of the kings of England, but also in controlling sales of English wool which was vital to continental workshops and in particular to the Arte della Lana of Florence.

[4] With the king's death in 1307, leaving a debt to all creditors that amounted to £30,000[5] Amedeo de' Frescobaldi continued in the favoured but dangerous position under Edward II; with the fall of Walter Langton, the royal treasurer, at the outset of the new reign, the bishop's debtors, many of them Italians, were instructed to render their debts to Frescobaldi; in 1309 he was granted all the wool customs from Ireland and Scotland.

[6] The barons' pressure against the influence of foreigners in the king's affairs, exemplified most prominently against the Gascon favourite, Piers Gaveston, swept up Frescobaldi, who at the time of the Ordinances of 1311 was ordered to tally up his accounts by October, and was arrested and all his goods seized.

Here, inmates spend the final years of their sentence, working and living in close contact with nature, while developing skills to support their return to society and the workforce.

In May 2006, the Frescobaldi family merged their Tenuta dell'Ornellaia, Castel Giocondo and Luce della Vite wine holdings into a new venture partnership, Tenute di Toscana, with Stolichnaya Vodka and Michael Mondavi.