Santa Croce, Florence
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"As I emerged from the porch of Santa Croce, I was seized with a fierce palpitation of the heart (that same symptom which, in Berlin, is referred to as an attack of the nerves); the well-spring of life was dried up within me, and I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground."--Rome, Naples, and Florence (1817) by Stendhal |
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The Basilica di Santa Croce (Basilica of the Holy Cross) is the principal Franciscan church in Florence, Italy, and a minor basilica of the Roman Catholic Church. It is situated on the Piazza di Santa Croce, about 800 metres south-east of the Duomo. The site, when first chosen, was in marshland outside the city walls. It is the burial place of some of the most illustrious Italians, such as Michelangelo, Galileo, Machiavelli, Foscolo, Gentile and Rossini, thus it is known also as the Temple of the Italian Glories (Tempio dell'Itale Glorie).
Funerary monuments
The Basilica became popular with Florentines as a place of worship and patronage and it became customary for greatly honoured Florentines to be buried or commemorated there. Some were in chapels "owned" by wealthy families such as the Bardi and Peruzzi. As time progressed, space was also granted to notable Italians from elsewhere. For 500 years monuments were erected in the church including those to:
- Leon Battista Alberti (15th-century architect and artistic theorist)
- Vittorio Alfieri (18th-century poet and dramatist)
- Eugenio Barsanti (co-inventor of the internal combustion engine)
- Lorenzo Bartolini (19th-century sculptor)
- Julie Clary, wife of Joseph Bonaparte, and their daughter Charlotte Napoléone Bonaparte
- Leonardo Bruni (15th-century chancellor of the Republic, scholar and historian)
- Dante (buried in Ravenna)
- Ugo Foscolo (19th-century poet)
- Galileo Galilei
- Giovanni Gentile (20th-century philosopher)
- Lorenzo Ghiberti (artist and bronze-smith)
- Niccolò Machiavelli by Innocenzo Spinazzi
- Carlo Marsuppini (15th-century chancellor of the Republic of Florence)
- Michelangelo Buonarroti
- Raffaello Morghen (19th-century engraver)
- Gioachino Rossini by Giuseppe Cassioli
- Louise of Stolberg-Gedern (wife of Charles Edward Stuart, 'Bonnie Prince Charlie')
- Guglielmo Marconi (buried in his birthplace at Sasso Marconi, near Bologna)
- Enrico Fermi (nuclear physicist, buried in Chicago, Illinois)
In literature
A Room with a View (1908), E.M. Forster, chapter 2
