Santa Croce

No place in Florence so feeds the urge to dispute as the church of Santa Croce, Tuscany’s ‘Westminster Abbey’, the largest Franciscan basilica in Italy. It was here that Stendhal had the revelation, now known as the Stendhal Syndrome:

I had attained to that supreme degree of sensibility where the divine intimations of art merge with the impassioned sensuality of emotion. As I emerged from the port of Santa Croce, I was seized with a fierce palpitation of the heart; I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground.

But don’t be put off; as beautiful as much of the art is, most people manage to emerge from a visit without tripping over themselves.

The Façade

The urge to dispute begins in the vast Piazza Santa Croce. Santa Croce’s neo-Gothic façade, built in 1857–63, was financed by Sir Francis Sloane, whose Sloane Square in London has more admirers than this white with green and pink striped design, derived from Orcagna’s Tabernacle in Orsanmichele. Edward Hutton, a founder of the British Institute in Florence, sniffed that it was ‘a pretentious work of modern Italy, which lends to what was of old the gayest piazza in the city, the very aspect of a cemetery.'