BASILICA DI SANTA CROCE & SANTA MARIA NOVELLA
Also known as The Pantheon of the Italian Glories (“Tempio dell’Itale Glorie or Pantheon dell’Itale Glorie”), the Basilica of the Holy Cross (Basilica di Santa Croce) is most noted for its illustrious dead people; or to be more precise, their extravagant funerary sculptures. In the instance of Dante, he’s actually buried in Ravenna…clearly a guilt-stricken Florence felt compelled to claim the body of the exiled-in-perpetuity progenitor of terza rima, if but to gloss over their culpability. Like Michelangelo, who is also buried there, Dante’s ghost hangs over the city, as he was not only a man of words and letters, but a partisan priore, who ironically sentenced his best friend and mentor (Guido Cavalcanti) to an ill-fated exile in Sarzana.
Medieval Florence was always in flux, balancing the rough tide of misgivings between Guelphs and Ghibellines, which ultimately devolved into the Black and White Guelphs– the former supporting Pope Boniface, the latter opposing him. Legend has it that Santa Croce was built with blood money, stolen from Ghibelline noblemen after they were tortured and killed by Guelf podesta’s. The take was three-fold: one third to the papacy, one third to the city coffers, one third to the building of the church. This bad blood first began with a princely cad, one Buondelmonte dei Buondelmonti, who rejected an arranged marriage with an Amidei noblewoman, and instead married the more comely Ciulla Donati; this led to his horrific murder on Easter Sunday at the foot of the Ponte Vecchio, below the statue of Mars, by Mosca, Oderigo, and some other Amedei thugs (think: Montague and Capulets, or Hatfields and McCoys). Thus began the bloody civil strife that engulfed Florence for hundreds of years, a family feud which became conflated with diametrically opposed political and religious ideologies. While Dante was no Ghibelline (he fought successfully against them at Montaperti), his sympathies did not extend to the papacy…it can be said that Boniface’s darkened name owes everything to Dante’s wicked tongue.
Michelangelo was equally surly, and likewise spent his final years in exile for backing the wrong horse. However, his impact on the tumultuous city-state was even more considerable than Mr. Alighieri, as an architect, sculptor, painter, writer, social critic, and planner of the city’s defenses; like Dante, he was prolific outside of his home town in his final years, overseeing the construction of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome until his death.
Come to think of it, Galileo spent his final years in house arrest for indirectly threatening the church with a new cosmology (non-Ptolomeic, of course), and Machiavelli was tortured, then exiled after pro-Medici forces took control of Florence. The odd man out in this group is one Gioacchino Rossini, the famed composer of the Barber of Seville, who died fat and happy.
The last photos in this series are of the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella, a Dominican church and the first great basilica in Florence.
