Santa Croce

St. Francis of Assisi visited Florence in 1211 and, although his order hadn’t yet been approved by the pope, he readily gained followers. In 1221, the Altafronti family donated property here to the Friars Minor of Saint Francis who first built a church dedicated to St. Anthony. Not wanting to be left behind by the Dominicans who were building Santa Maria Novella across town, the Franciscans hired Arnolfo di Cambio to tear down the old church and build what is now known as the Basilica of Santa Croce (the Holy Cross). The project was begun in 1294 (a few months before Dante embarked on his political career). Two of the Great Guilds, the Arte dei Mercanti and the Arte di Calimala, were most responsible for the monies it required but Cardinal Matteo d’Acquasparta proclaimed an indulgence to anyone who donated resources for its completion (perhaps the best thing he ever did for Florence).

Chronicler Giovanni Villani remembers the founding ceremony:

“In the year of our Lord 1294, on the Day of the Holy Cross in May, they founded the great new church of the Friars Minor called Santa Croce. At the solemn ceremony for the laying of the first stone, there were bishops, prelates, clerics and religious figures, and the podestà and the Captain and the Priors and all the upstanding citizens of Florence, men and women alike. They began laying the foundation from the back where the chapels will be because that is also where the old church was and I personally was a member of the construction committee of the friars until the new chapels were finished.” (Nuova cronica 9.7)

Above: Dante’s cenotaph

Once you’re inside, you’ll notice what appears at first glance to be Dante’s tomb. Because his remains were never buried here, though, it’s more properly called Dante’s cenotaph.

Dante never saw Santa Croce’s façade because it wasn’t finished until the mid-1800s, but he certainly spent time inside. Some have claimed that Dante was a Franciscan tertiary, which would explain why he was wearing a cord around his waist in the first half of the Inferno, the belt that Virgil throws into the abyss to summon the monster Geryon. Supporters of this claim also point to the fact that our poet was buried near a Franciscan church in Ravenna.

What we know for certain is that Dante was very familiar with Franciscanism. Indeed, he knew Bonaventure’s biography of Francis as well as the Journey of the Mind to God, a classic work of medieval mysticism that dovetails nicely with Dante’s Comedy. The connection between Franciscans and the Holy Cross was made in Francis’ receival of the stigmata, which is portrayed in the frescoes of the choir.

There are only a few steps between the choir and the Bardi chapel where Giotto’s portrayal of Francis is found together with numerous tombstones of the Bardi family, to whom Beatrice was related through her marriage to Simone, especially near the main altar. Descendants of the Cavalcanti are also easy to spot.

Set into the pavement are 276 tombstones, the earliest of which date to the late 1200s. Look for the tombstone of Guiduccio Schicchi, the son of Gianni Schicchi of the Cavalcanti family who appears in Inferno among the counterfeiters. Knowing his father Buoso Donati intended to give his belongings to the poor, Simone Donati hired Gianni Schicchi to imitate Buoso on his deathbed and to change the will in his favor.

The story is perhaps better known from Puccini’s comic opera, but it was Dante who first immortalized it. On Guiduccio’s slab is a monkey, a fitting testament to a man who was perhaps as good as his father at doing imitations.

The church has other monikers as well, including the Temple of Italian Glory, the Mausoleum of Famous Italians and the Italian Westminster Abbey. Indeed, in addition to Dante’s cenotaph, Santa Croce also houses the remains of Niccolò Machiavelli, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Galileo Galilei, Ugo Foscolo (19th-century poet and Dante scholar), Vittorio Alfieri (18th-century tragedian) and Enrico Fermi (20th-century nuclear scientist), among others.