echo-de-la-lumiere:

While I don’t roleplay as any Italian Renaissance characters, it is one of my areas of knowledge and I have many books that I think would be helpful or useful to the roleplayer who wishes to add historical, political, economic, and intellectual context to their work.

• Lisa Jardine & Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art Between East and West
• Highly recommended for any Armand player. Explains how Ottoman Empire and Venice interacted through economic and cultural exchange. Lots of stuff to be learned here, and just a great and easy read. If you can’t get to anything else in the book, at least get the preface and the first chapter (I think; it’s been years since I’ve read it though I remember all the lecture slides), which give a great summary and taster about the topic and the authors’ approach. You probably would want to continue after that. This is one of my favorite books.
• Gene Brucker, Florence: The Golden Age, 1138-1737
• Tons of pictures, giant book, great survey of the feel of the time period.
• Joanne M. Ferraro, Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice (2001)
• Venetians be suing each other, guys, all the freakin’ time, over marriage contracts. First-person stuff, lots of records, it’s awesome and lively and oh my god how sassy must Armand have gotten?
• Okay to be honest, it’s mostly legal gossip, actual depositions, legal records, etc. Give it a skip if you really don’t care about he-said-she-said.
• Jerry Brotton, The Renaissance Bazaar: From The Silk Road to Michelangelo (2002)
• Really lively read about how Armand probably shopped, told by a recently deceased scholar who was a giant of European Renaissance history. Really cool depiction of how East and West exchanged culture and also created some serious problems that we deal with today.
• Ulinka Rublack, Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (2010)
• Because Bianca’s pearls in her hair and Armand’s hose and doublet meant something. Also, lots of fun pictures here, and you can imagine the various costumes Marius would have used to disguise, perform, and hint at a different identity.
• Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods
• Super awesome street-smart history (with pictures) about how multicultural the economics of Ottoman Empire-infused Italy was. Just super cool and wide-reaching.
• Heather Gregory, Selected Letters of Alessandra Strozzi
• Probably the best book for figuring out what Marius would have nagged Armand and Ricardo about. It’s this awesome Italian lady who just writes letters to her sons nagging them about stuff they forgot to do.
• Francesco Petrarca (trans. David Marsh), Invectives
• Stop giving Armand boring essays to read for homework, Marius.
• Jon Thiem, Lorenzo de’ Medici: Selected Poems and Prose (1992)
• Lorenzo really liked making dick jokes. Let Armand write some, too!
• Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists and Painters
• Pretty much Vasari going around Italy throwing shade at everyone and gossiping.
• Paolo Uccello really hated cheese and Michelangelo was a dick who snatched really nice pieces of wood from competitors by auctioning early.
• Peter Robb, M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio
• To be honest, this is a pretty controversial biography of Caravaggio, or as Robb claims, “Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio”. 
• It’s Caravaggio shittalking, dueling, and fucking his way across Italy until the fuzz finally comes after him. Oh, and he apologizes to his patrons a lot and then paints horse butts next to priest faces, so this book kind of made him my childhood hero.

Books I have NOT read but know of:

• Guido Ruggerio, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex, Crime, and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice
• Find out if Marius (and those gold-painted giggling guys testing Armand) were legit.
• Judith Brown, Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy
• I think this is just a fun title about an important topic that probably gets ignored a lot.
• Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence

I have more sources I can recommend, but these are nice to get started and were sitting on my bookshelf.