Travel

/

Home & Leisure

Florence discoveries

By Rick Steves, Tribune Content Agency on

Geographically small but culturally rich, Florence is home to some of the greatest art and architecture in the world. I've been there more times than I can count, and with each visit, I'm reminded that I've barely scratched the surface of all it has to offer.

In this city of noble and elegant facades, inspirational sights are everywhere you look. Some of them are hiding in plain sight.

Take the Piazza Santissima Annunziata, the most Renaissance square in Florence. It sits behind the much-visited Accademia (home to Michelangelo's "David"), but most tourists probably don't know it's there, a perfectly preserved urban cloister from the 15th century.

On a recent trip, I took a closer look at the square's Hospital of the Innocents. Filippo Brunelleschi, who gave the Florence cathedral its famous dome, designed the hospital -- the first truly Renaissance building -- in the 1420s. Its graceful arches and columns, with each set of columns forming a square, embodies the quintessence of Renaissance harmony and typified the new aesthetic of calm balance and symmetry.

The building is ornamented with sweet blue-and-white terra-cotta medallions by Luca della Robbia -- each showing a different way to swaddle an infant (meant to help babies grow straight, and practiced in Italy until about a century ago).

Terra-cotta -- made of glazed and painted clay -- was a combination of painting and sculpture, but cheaper than either. For three generations the Della Robbia family guarded the secret recipe and made their name bringing affordable art to Florence.

 

With its mission to care for the least among society (parentless or unwanted children), this hospital was also an important symbol of the increasingly humanistic and humanitarian outlook of Renaissance Florence. For four centuries (until 1875), impoverished parents or unmarried girls left their infants anonymously at the "wheel of the innocents" (a lazy-Susan compartment that could be rotated from outside the hospital). Today the building houses a museum that tells the story of the babies left there.

Brunelleschi also designed another less-visited sight -- the Basilica of San Lorenzo, which has a surprisingly plain exterior. Its facade of rough, exposed brick was left unfinished when the Church ran out of money for the project.

But inside you'll feel the spirit of Florence in the 1420s, with gray and white columns and arches in perfect Renaissance balance. An adjacent cloister leads to a similarly harmonious space, the Laurentian Medici Library, designed by Michelangelo.

Climb the impressive staircase and enter the Reading Room -- a long, rectangular hall that hosted academics enjoying the Medici family's collection of manuscripts. The room itself has the look and feel of a Renaissance church, with a high coffered ceiling, rows of "pews" (benches for the scholars), and stained-glass windows, decorated with Medici heraldic emblems. This was a place to worship learning.

...continued

swipe to next page

(c)2015 RICK STEVES DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

Comics

Walt Handelsman David M. Hitch Dave Whamond Adam Zyglis Andy Capp Bob Englehart