Medicis’ Remains to Be Exhumed

Italian and American scientists will exhume the remains of 49 members of the Medici clan, the powerful Renaissance merchant family that ruled Tuscany, to study what they ate and what illnesses they suffered.

The two-year project is unusual because it concerns an elite group of people for whom there already is a vast amount of documentation. That information could be compared with any new scientific findings, researchers said.

“Studies have been done on crypts of monks, hundreds of Capuchin friars in southern Italy ... but nobody has ever worked on a royal population,” said mummy expert Bob Brier of the C.W. Post campus of Long Island University, one of the study’s lead researchers.

“In a sense, we’re looking at the lifestyles of the rich and famous.”

The project will provide researchers with a better look at the lives of the Medicis, who ruled Tuscany during the Renaissance and sponsored much of its most famous art.

Also, paleopathologists, who study diseases in ancient times, will be able to chart a thorough medical history of one of the most renowned families in European history, said Gino Fornaciari, a history of medicine professor at the University of Pisa and the project leader.

For example, the Medicis were known to have suffered from the painful arthritic disease gout, apparently because of a genetic predisposition but also compounded by a meat-based diet, Fornaciari said.

But the documentation is incomplete, so researchers say they will be able to “write the medical history of the family again” with new technology.