For most of us, understanding our pasts requires a bit of detective work—piecing together family stories, yellowing scrapbooks, and saved letters to form an idea of what life was like for those who came before.

But what if you had more than just scraps and pieces? What if every relative you ever had kept a diary, and they were all in one place?

One Florentine family has managed just that. In a recent feature in T Magazine, reporter Tim Parks visits the Villa le Corti in Tuscany, which houses the Corsini family archives—4,000 feet of volumes spanning 600 years of history, painstakingly recorded in day-to-day detail.

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