Basilica di Santa Croce

The Basilica di Santa Croce at Piazza di Santa Croce, 16 in Florence is the largest Franciscan church in the world and one of the most historically charged Gothic buildings in Italy. Construction of the present basilica began in 1294, attributed to Arnolfo di Cambio, on the site of a smaller Franciscan oratory established in the 1220s by followers of St Francis of Assisi. The main structure was substantially complete by 1385, though the nave was not vaulted. The current polychrome marble facade — a neo-Gothic design in pink, white, and green — dates from 1857-1863, designed by Niccolò Matas and funded by the English banker Francis Sloane. Santa Croce functions as the national pantheon of Italy, containing approximately 276 tombs, funerary monuments, and commemorative plaques dedicated to the most distinguished Italians of all time. The tomb of Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) is the first major monument encountered on the right as visitors enter the nave, housed in a tomb designed by Giorgio Vasari and ornamented with allegorical sculptures of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), whose original burial was restricted by the Church on grounds of heresy, was reinterred here in 1737 nearly a century after his death. Other occupants include Niccolò Machiavelli, Leon Battista Alberti, Lorenzo Ghiberti, and composer Gioachino Rossini. A cenotaph to Dante Alighieri, exiled from Florence and buried in Ravenna in 1321, stands near the entrance; Florence's repeated requests to repatriate his remains have been refused by Ravenna. The Bardi and Peruzzi chapels in the right transept contain fresco cycles by Giotto di Bondone painted around 1315-1325, depicting respectively the life of St Francis and the lives of St John the Baptist and St John the Evangelist. These frescoes are foundational works of European painting: Giotto's command of three-dimensional space, emotional expression, and narrative coherence broke radically from Byzantine convention and established the formal vocabulary inherited by Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. The frescoes were whitewashed in the 17th century and rediscovered in 1841; restoration work stabilised the remains but cannot recover what was lost beneath the limewash. Donatello's gilded limestone Annunciation (c.1435) in the south nave is a key work of Early Renaissance sculpture. Off the first cloister stands the Cappella dei Pazzi (Pazzi Chapel), designed by Filippo Brunelleschi around 1429 and completed posthumously in the 1460s — a canonical masterpiece of Early Renaissance architecture defined by perfect proportions, pendentive roundels by Luca della Robbia, and pietra serena grey stone against white plaster walls. Cimabue's large painted Crucifix (c.1288), severely damaged in the November 1966 Arno flood, is exhibited in the adjoining museum after extensive restoration.