Founder of the Como family, Angelo emerges as a merchant-banker capable of combining vision, calculation, and relationships. He is the portrait of an international operator who knows suppliers, routes, and timings. Not a “provincial” who imports fashions, but a skilled businessman who weaves close relationships with Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Pazzi family, creating a tight bond between Naples and Florence. His way of influencing the respective courts, Neapolitan and Florentine, is understood from how in 1469, in the remodeling of the first Como palace, no longer satisfied with just local piperno stone, he buys pre-worked stone elements in pietra serena from Florence, shipped by water from the port of Signa to Naples. This bringing of “Florentine-style” materials into a Neapolitan typology (merchant’s house) significantly transforms the living culture of his time.
When in December 1488 Alfonso of Aragon gives him not a simple garden, but an articulated real estate complex, Angelo starts the second program: a domus magna “in the Florentine style,” with a porticoed viridarium, ashlar facing, and a coherent design of a modern palace: the Palazzo Como is born, an extraordinary example of “Tuscan-style” architecture that is today the Filangieri Museum.

Fabrizio Venato Dentice, 4th Duke of Accadia, belongs to the Neapolitan nobility that experienced the transition between the Ancien Régime and modernity. His residence on Via Duomo, now the site of Accadia Relais, was for decades a center of social and intellectual life: dinners, meetings, and conversations on the themes of the “Enlightenment” and progress were held there. A man of great elegance, educated in military discipline and a famous swordsman, the duke embodied the model of the cultured and curious gentleman of his time.
In 1794, he was unwillingly involved in Jacobin conspiracies and sentenced to confinement in Lipari. He escaped a few years later and returned to Naples with a pardon, later being reinstated during the reign of Joachim Murat. Sources describe him as a controversial figure: for some, an aristocrat close to modern ideas, for others, an opportunist.
What is certain is that the Duke of Accadia managed to remain at the center of the political and social life of the Kingdom, transforming his palace into a symbol of openness, dialogue, and family continuity between tradition and modernity.