Santa Croce and Sant'Ambrogio

Bargello

The city's oldest public building, begun in 1255, and now Italy's first national museum of sculpture.

You're standing outside the Bargello, the oldest public building in Florence, begun in 1255. For its first centuries it was the Palazzo del Podestà, home of the chief magistrate, and his coats of arms still crowd the courtyard walls. From 1574 the building became police headquarters and a prison, named after the bargello, the city's police chief. Executions took place in the courtyard until 1786.

In 1479 the Pazzi conspirator Bernardo Bandini Baroncelli was hanged from these walls, and Leonardo da Vinci sketched the body. Since 1865 it has been Italy's first national museum, and the sculpture inside is the real reason to step through the door: Donatello's bronze David, Michelangelo's Bacchus, Cellini's bronzes. If you go in, find the chapel where Giotto's workshop painted the oldest known portrait of Dante, a young man with a serious face. It links this old law court to the abbey you're about to cross toward, where Dante used to hear the monks sing.

Badia Fiorentina

A Benedictine abbey founded in 978 whose bells once set the rhythm of Dante's Florence.

Cross Via del Proconsolo and stand before the Badia Fiorentina, a Benedictine abbey founded in 978 by Willa, Countess of Tuscany. Badia is the Florentine word for abbey, and its official dedication is Santa Maria Assunta. Arnolfo di Cambio rebuilt the church in Gothic form around 1300, and the tall bell tower was finished between 1310 and 1330. For centuries its bells rang out the hours of the working day; Dante remembered them in the Paradiso, the terce and nones still ringing to all the town.

He grew up just across the street, and legend says he first saw Beatrice in this church. In 1373 Boccaccio gave the first public reading of the Divine Comedy in a chapel beside the north door. Inside, look for Filippino Lippi's Apparition of the Madonna to Saint Bernard, and if the cloister is open, the small orange garden around the Chiostro degli Aranci. The abbey still belongs to a living monastic community, so step lightly.

Basilica di Santa Croce

Florence's pantheon, with the tombs of Michelangelo, Galileo, and Machiavelli under one Franciscan roof.

You're at Santa Croce, the great Franciscan church that Florence treats as its pantheon. Around two hundred and fifty graves still lie under the terracotta floor. The most famous began with Michelangelo, who died in Rome in 1564. His nephew brought the body home hidden in a bale, and the church was so crowded when it arrived that the corpse could hardly be moved to the sacristy.

His tomb, designed by Vasari, stands in the south aisle. Across the nave hangs Galileo's monument, put up only in 1737, nearly a century after he died in 1642, because church authorities resisted honoring a man suspected of heresy. Machiavelli waited even longer; he died in 1527 and got his tomb in 1787. Dante is not here.

His body stayed in Ravenna, and the church gave him an empty cenotaph in 1830. The marble facade was finished only in 1865, timed to the six hundredth anniversary of Dante's birth. In 1966 the Arno flooded the nave, and today you can still see water marks high on the walls.