The Basilica of Santa Croce

Cimabue, Giotto, Donatello, Brunelleschi, Della Robbia, Vasari and many more of Italy’s greatest artists have left their indelible mark here. But Santa Croce also offers something more: it is the true pantheon of Italian culture, once celebrated by the poet Ugo Foscolo in his ode Dei Sepolcri. Michelangelo, Galileo, Ghiberti, Vasari, Bruni, Rossini and Alfieri are all buried here. Thus, to walk its aisles is to take a fascinating journey through seven hundred years of our history, accompanied step by step by some of its most illustrious makers and this book’s author, Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi, curator of the Bargello National Museum and eminent scholar of Santa Croce and its inestimable art treasures.