The Medici's Daughter

RAI 1 Original Series

She was raised in the most powerful family in Florence. The city made her extraordinary and then refused to know what to do with her. Set in Laurentian Florence at the apex of the Italian Renaissance, The Medici's Daughter follows Caterina de' Medici — not the historical queen of France, a fictional member of the extended Medici family — 25, a Black woman raised in the Medici household as a ward and recognized member of the family's extended patronage network. She has been raised with the full intellectual formation of a Medici education: Latin, Greek, Platonic philosophy, art, music, architecture. She is the Medici in every cultural dimension. Her arranged marriage to Giovanni Trotti, a diplomat of the Sforza court in Milan, creates the series' central engine: a woman shaped by the most extraordinary cultural court in Europe navigating the politics of another powerful Italian dynasty. Two seasons follow her marriage, her intellectual life in both Florence and Milan, and her eventual role as a significant behind-the-scenes patron of the arts in her own right. S1E1 — Il Giardino dei Medici Caterina in the Medici gardens. The Platonic Academy in session. Her marriage arrangement announced by Lorenzo with genuine apology in his eyes. S1E6 — Milano Caterina in the Sforza court. Her first salon — speaking Latin, Greek, and Tuscan Italian in the same evening. Milan realizing what Florence sent them. S2E10 — Il Mecenatismo (The Patronage) Series finale: Caterina commissioning her own artistic works — under Giovanni's name, at first, and then openly under her own. The final scene is her name, in her hand, at the bottom of a contract.

Story added by mr95 on August 1, 2026