photo: flickr.com/nunocardoso |
Highlights inside include two bronze pulpits sculpted by Donatello (unfortunately covered and in the process of restoration work while we were there) and a lot of Medici tombs.
In the San Lorenzo complex, you can pass through the cloister...
...and into the Laurentian Library, whose main reading room was designed by Michelangelo:
photo: flickr.com/brad-darren |
Established by one of the Medici popes in the early 1500s, the library holds some incredibly old books and Bibles.
This Latin Bible, the Codex Amiatinus, was commissioned in the late 600s, probably for St. Peter's Basilica:
And this is the first complete polyglot edition of the Bible: Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Aramaic, from the early 1500s:
Elsewhere in the San Lorenzo complex, you find the Cappelle Medicee (Medici Chapels). Forty-nine members of Florence's most prominent family, the Medicis, are buried here.
The Chapel of the Princes holds the tombs of six Medici Grand Dukes:
The museum and crypt contain family jewels, as well as lots of relics (bones of saints...very strange/unsettling for us as Protestants, I'll admit).
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