The Medici's neighborhood: Brunelleschi's basilica behind its famously unfinished façade, the market bustle, and Florence at its most lived-in.
Basilica • Medici Library • Market Streets
Explore → Get Early AccessTwo minutes' walk from the cathedral
Separate tickets; combined visits possible
More with the Medici Chapels next door
Leather stalls by day around the square
The Medici's parish neighborhood. Brunelleschi's serene basilica behind its famous bare-brick face, Michelangelo's Laurentian Library up the stairs, and the market bustle the family would recognize. Power's home turf, still busy.
San Lorenzo is among Florence's oldest churches (consecrated 393); the Medici rebuilt it as their own from 1419 with Brunelleschi's design, and generations of the family, Cosimo the Elder to the last duchess, lie in and beneath it.
Cosimo the Elder lies beneath the basilica's crossing under the simple inscription 'Pater Patriae', father of the fatherland, positioned so every Mass is said over him. To supply the façade marble that never came, Michelangelo spent three years building a road to the Pietrasanta quarries; the road outlived the project.
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