Were Italians to identify one monument in their culturally and linguistically diverse nation as representing its valhalla—the locus of their fatherland’s identity—it would be the great conventual Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence. Begun at the end of the thirteenth century during the meteoric rise of the Franciscan Order, the giant Gothic structure is surrounded by equally imposing monastic outbuildings and cloisters, as well as that jewel of Early Renaissance architecture, Filippo Brunelleschi’s Pazzi Chapel. The nave, transept, and chapels of the basilica tell a capsule story of Italian art—from Cimabue to Canova—while, lining those same walls, rows of tombs and cenotaphs recall human achievement in all its manifestations: from Dante to Alfieri, from Michelangelo to Galileo, and from Leonardo Bruni to Gioachino Rossini. Santa Croce is really more a pantheon of greatness than a church. Its nineteenth-century façade, a symbol of ecumenical inclusiveness, was financed in great part by an English Protestant magnate, Sir Francis Joseph Sloane, and prominently bears a Star of David in tribute to its Jewish architect, Niccolò Matas.
Santa Croce is really more a pantheon of greatness than a church.
Just as I and most of my fellow Florentines were only dimly aware that Santa Croce’s façade was a Victorian pastiche, so too did we barely realize that the basilica was built on land far below the high-water level of the nearby Arno River. This fact, however, was startlingly revealed to us and the rest of
