That the Vespucci family resided in the ancient castle of Montefioralle is certain, attested by the presence of a building indicated as the house where its members lived and by the discovery of the tomb of the last Vespucci, in 1954, during the renovation of the cemetery of Montefioralle. Amerigo Vespucci was born in Florence on March 9, 1454, died in Seville on February 22, 1512. He was a cosmographer and explorer in the service of Portugal and Spain. Previously he had been employed by Giannotto Berardi, who directed the branch of the Italian bankers of the Medici in Seville. Died Berardi, in 1495, he directed the branch and set up the ships for the second voyage of Columbus, of which he was always a friend. In 1499, as pilot of Alfonso de Ojeda, he arrived in Venezuela and Colombia. Perhaps it was he who called that first land ‘Venezuela’, or little Venice, given that the indigenous people of Maracaibo built their houses in the water. In two other trips he arrived in Brazil, skirting a large part of South America, and founding the first Portuguese farm. The rapid spread of the letters circulating in his name led the cartographer Martin Waldseemüller to use the feminine gender (America) of his Latinized name (Americus Vespucius), to indicate the new continent in a map of the world drawn in 1507, contained in the Cosmographiae Introductio. The merit of Vespucci was that of realizing that the earth was larger than what was believed; he specified that it had 40,000 kilometers in circumference, he sensed the existence of an ocean between the New World and Asia and was the first to discover that the new lands formed a new continent. The importance of Amerigo Vespucci also lies in his letters, from which the European public received for the first time information relating to America, the new continent discovered beyond the Atlantic Ocean.
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