  The 1460s saw Ficino gain an audience in Florence. Much later in life he would write that the wealthy and powerful Cosimo de’ Medici had not only been his most important patron, which was certainly true, but that he had also acted as the guiding genius behind a Platonic Academy. While extant sources do not permit us to understand the Platonic Academy as a formal school or advanced institution with regular meetings, there are some facts that can be documented: Cosimo in 1463 gave Ficino a small property in Careggi with a domicile (“cum domo pro laboratore et hoste et terris laboratis,” as the document in the State Archive of Florence puts it; see Gentile, Niccoli, and Viti 1984, 175–76). There is also a letter from Ficino to Cosimo from September of 1462, in which Ficino writes: “spiritedly do I devote myself to the Academy you arranged for us on the estate in Careggi, as if I worship rightly at a kind of shrine of contemplation” (See Ficino in Kristeller 1938, 2: 87–88; and Gentile, Niccoli, and Viti 1984, 176). These two sources allow the inference that, while the specific gift of property did not occur until 1463, Ficino and his cohort met at least once on Medici property in the hills outside Florence. There is another document, again from 1462, which shows that he received a house in the city of Florence as a gift from Cosimo, which was then rented out, so that Ficino received the income from the rent (Gentile, Niccoli, and Viti 1984, 174–75).