Museo degli Innocenti

About this place

A coin snipped in half with shears, a carefully knotted ribbon, a religious medal broken in two: small things left by poor mothers alongside the babies they could not keep, the matching half kept in the mother's own hand in the hope that she might one day come back and prove the child was hers. That archive of tokens is preserved here and displayed across a full room, and most of those mothers never came back. It is the heart of this museum, and the most honest thing you will see in a city that is very good at showing off its gold. The building is also a landmark in the history of architecture. Brunelleschi's loggia (1419-1427) is routinely called the first building conceived wholly in the language of the Renaissance, and Andrea della Robbia's blue glazed roundels with their swaddled infants completed the facade in 1487 - all of it out in the open air, free to study from the square without a ticket, though most of what you see up there now is a nineteenth-century copy and the surviving originals are kept inside. The institution itself opened in 1445, the first in Europe purpose-built to care for abandoned children, and it is still going today as the Istituto degli Innocenti. The famous rotating wheel - the opening where an infant could be placed from outside and turned inward without the face of whoever left him ever being seen - was installed in 1660; before that there was a stone basin under the portico. It was sealed in 1875, when anonymous abandonment gave way to a formal admissions office. So let us be plain: if you have two days in Florence and have not yet been inside the Uffizi or the Accademia, this is not your stop. The picture gallery is small, with Ghirlandaio's Adoration of the Magi (1488-89), an early Botticelli Madonna and Child with an Angel and some della Robbia work, but it does not compete with the great collections and does not try to. The value is downstairs in the historical floor, and in the fact that this is one of the very few museums in the city that talks about ordinary people rather than princes. That makes it an excellent choice on a second visit to Florence, or for a family with children who have had enough marble, or for anyone who genuinely wants two quiet hours: crowds here are rare and tickets can usually be bought on the day without booking, which in this city is a luxury in itself. The displays are tastefully done and entirely suitable for children - nothing here is disturbing, unlike the anatomical waxes at La Specola. You are about a ten-minute walk from the Duomo, on what is the calmest and most harmonious square in the centre, with the San Marco museum a couple of minutes away if you want to pair the two. On the top floor, the Caffe del Verone sits on a rooftop once used for drying the hospital's laundry, with a side-on view of Brunelleschi's dome; you can go up without a museum ticket and it stays open well after the museum closes - reason enough to drop in on its own. The nearest mosque is on Borgo Allegri behind Santa Croce, the only one in the historic centre, roughly twenty minutes on foot, and halal butchers are easy to find near the Mercato Centrale and on Via dell'Oriuolo.