Scaffolding obscured San Miniato al Monte, supposedly one of the most beautiful Byzantine churches in Italy. I continued the ascent because I came more in search of views than salvation.
Seek and ye shall find!
In the mid-19th century, a cloister adjacent to the church was transformed into the Cimitero delle Porte Sante.
The elaborate monuments gave me a sneak preview of what I would find several days later in Milan. Unfortunately, a looped loudspeaker announcement in multiple languages apologizing for the church's ongoing restoration, spoiled the serenity of my late afternoon visit.
It really looked like no cemetery I ever had seen, probably because it had served as a barracks and a hospital in its own past life.
I stumbled upon the tomb of a famous movie director.
Why was he buried with two unrelated people? In that moment, I decided to visit the museum dedicated to his career, unmentioned in my itinerary research, but in a building with a prominent red banner not far from the Piazza della Signora.
The Piazzale Michelangelo, just below the cemetery, commands a view of Florence's historic center and the Arno River, not visible from the church because of elevation angle.
The crowd gathers only at the western end.
For good reason, of course. Camera-phone aggression facilitated this shot.
A younger and fitter crowd than I had seen dining in the city had gathered to watch the sun set.
I arrived the next morning at the Basilica di Santa Croce, also known as the Temple of the Italian Glories for excellent reason.
Galileo didn't merit this massive tomb until a century after his death because the Vatican considered his scientific views heresy. He had been buried discreetly behind the church in 1642. Only through the intervention of the Medici dynasty, trying to reduce the power of the church, did he become an insider. His heavenward gaze is a masterstroke of compromise.
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| Monumental tomb of Galileo Galilei by Giovanni Battista Foggini (1737) |
But if he were to look straight across the church, he would see Michelangelo's tomb designed by . . . Vasari! Like the scientist across from him, Santa Croce wasn't the artist's first resting place. After his burial in Rome, his nephew quickly exhumed his remains and smuggled them ("secretly in a bale, under the title of merchandise") back to Florence. The church initially tried to keep their presence a secret, but word soon spread and Florentines soon mobbed the church to honor the Tuscan artist who had been born 62 miles away. Cosimo I decreed that Michelangelo should be entombed in Santa Croce rebutting accusations of grave theft by reminding the outraged Roman Catholics that the artist's ancestors were buried there, too.
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| Monumental Tomb of Michelangelo Buonarroti by Giorgio Vasari (1564-1576) |
The Medici dynasty, however, prevented Machiavelli's remains, initially buried in a modest Santa Croce family chapel, from being glorified because the "father of modern political science" had opposed their regime. In fact, he wrote The Prince, his most famous work, while exiled from the city. It took 150 years, British publication of his complete works in six volumes and a new duke in town (Austrian and soon to be penultimate Holy Roman Emperor!) before the commission of Machiavelli's off-brand monument.
The allegorical figure of Justice sits atop his sarcophagus with a mirror reflecting his image in her right arm, and balanced scales in her left, an allusion to the presumed goals of diplomacy. My takeaway from reading The Prince in Contemporary Civilization, another course in Columbia's core curriculum, was that political success depended far more on manipulation than the dispensation of justice, a lesson certainly ratified by the current occupant of the White House. Still, I always will be grateful to Machiavelli because he expressed his philosophy more succinctly and clearly than anyone else on the list.
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| Monumental Tomb of Niccolò Machiavelli by Innocenzo Spinazzi (1787) |
Finally, because I didn't realize Rossini had been laid to rest in Santa Croce too, there's Dante's cenotaph, sculpted by an artist heavily influenced by Antonio Canova more than 500 years after the author of the The Divine Comedy (core curriculum, again, depicted beneath his right elbow, and much tougher going than The Prince) died and was buried in Ravenna. A homeboy in the Habsburg dynasty, then in power, recognized the value of the duchy's cultural patrimony and what better place than the Italian equivalent of Valhalla to memorialize Tuscany's master poet?
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| Cenotaph of Dante Alighieri by Stefano Ricci (1818-1829) |
More Northern Italy
Florence
Bologna
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