Day 15: “In Santa Croce with No Baedecker”

Another day, another historic adventure in Firenze.

Luckily, I felt significantly better today, well enough that I felt up to a class field trip to the church of Santa Croce (i.e., the Holy Cross) on the other side of town. The piazza around the church was still filled with the temporary stadium set up for a game of calcio on the feast day of San Giovanni, but the church, a blinding white in the scorching sun, drove out everything else from view. Inside we followed the professor down the impressively large nave, learning that the church was originally built on a much smaller scale in honor of St. Francis. A symbol of poverty and simplicity, the ideal of St. Francis was quickly ornamented with a bigger, grander church, covered in every inch by frescos. Today, after the “restoration” of Giovanni Vasari, many…