Francesco Has Arrived. Before Florence was the golden city of the powerful Medici and harbinger of the Italian Renaissance, it was a burgeoning town of merchants and nobility and a battleground for two centuries-old rival factions: the Guelfs and Ghibellines. The Guidi family is a once-powerful, once-proud family on both sides of the quarrel at the beginning of the fourteenth century. That quarrel is all but forgotten when the scion of an ancient branch of the family comes to Florence to claim his legacy. Word soon spreads that Francesco has arrived. Whyte Rose & Violet, Scribes celebrates the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Ellen L. Ekstrom's tale of fourteenth-century Florence and Tuscany, "The Legacy," with a new, expanded, revised edition.