Medici Chapels

The Medici buried themselves the way they lived — with the best artist available and no budget ceiling — and the Medici Chapels behind San Lorenzo are the result: the family mausoleum in two acts, one bombastic, one sublime.

The bombast first: the Chapel of the Princes, a colossal octagon sheathed floor to dome in dark inlaid marble and semi-precious stone, the grand dukes' sarcophagi ringed beneath a dome second in the city only to Brunelleschi's. It was so expensive it took three centuries to (almost) finish, and its po-faced enormity is its own honest portrait of late Medici power.

Then the reason to come: Michelangelo's New Sacristy. Between 1520 and 1534 he built and carved a complete room — architecture, tombs and figures as one composition — for two minor Medici dukes. Over Lorenzo the Thinker brood Dawn and Dusk; over Giuliano, Night and Day: four reclining marble figures of time itself, among the most influential sculptures he ever made. Night — asleep, owl beneath her knee, mask below — was so admired in his lifetime that poems were pinned to her; Michelangelo answered in verse, in her voice: while injustice reigns, "not to see, not to hear, is my great fortune — so do not wake me; ah, speak softly." The room does that to visitors still.

The recent revelation is the stanza segreta — the secret room under the sacristy where Michelangelo hid for months in 1530 after backing the anti-Medici republic, and where he covered the walls in charcoal drawings: studies of legs, a head of Laocoön, sketches arguing with his own finished work overhead. Access is by separate timed reservation in tiny groups; if your dates allow it, book it — standing in the cell where the century's greatest draughtsman doodled for his life is Florence's most intimate ticket.

An hour covers the chapels unhurried. Pair with the San Lorenzo market complex around the corner — the Mercato Centrale's food hall is the right lunch after all that marble mortality.