Santa Croce gets visited for the wrong reason and deserves three right ones.
The reason everybody goes is the tombs: Michelangelo, Galileo, Machiavelli, Rossini, and a monument to Dante the poet has never occupied. It is why Ugo Foscolo called it the Temple of Italian Glories, and it is what ends up in the guidebooks.
The better reasons are three others, and they all lie beyond the nave. At the far right there are two chapels frescoed by Giotto, which are his painted testament. In a room of the convent there is the Crucifix by Cimabue, the object Italy used as the symbol of the 1966 flood. And at the end of the first cloister there is Brunelleschi’s Pazzi Chapel, which you can look at sitting down, alone, while two hundred metres away people queue for the dome by the same architect.
The facade is nineteenth-century, and it shows
Before going in it is worth knowing what you are looking at, because it is the most misunderstood thing in the complex.
The basilica was begun at the end of the thirteenth century, and the traditional attribution of the design to Arnolfo di Cambio is accepted by scholars even without a document to prove it. But the facade faced in white, green and pink marble that you see from the square is neo-Gothic and was built between 1854 and 1863 to a design by Niccolò Matas. For centuries, as at San Lorenzo, the front had remained rough pietraforte.
It is not a flaw and it is in fact useful to know: that facade tells the story of a nineteenth century building itself a middle ages to measure, and the same cultural operation explains why in those same decades the basilica was filling up with monumental tombs. I have written about the original architect in the article on Arnolfo di Cambio.
The tombs, and the most famous one is empty
Inside, along the walls of the nave, you walk among the funerary monuments. Michelangelo is buried here in a tomb designed by Giorgio Vasari. Galileo Galilei has a monument on the opposite wall. There are Machiavelli, Vittorio Alfieri with a monument by Antonio Canova, Gioachino Rossini, moved here in 1887, and Ugo Foscolo, who was buried here in 1871 in a hugely attended public ceremony, forty-four years after dying in exile in England.
The monument to Dante Alighieri is instead a cenotaph, that is an empty tomb. Florence had exiled the poet and sentenced him to death in absentia; when centuries later it asked for his remains back, Ravenna refused to give them up, and the bones are still there. The Florentine monument remains a request that was never granted, which makes it more eloquent than it would otherwise have been. I have written about the city that keeps them in the article on what to see in Ravenna.
One figure gives the measure of the phenomenon: the basilica came to hold fifteen thousand bodies. Every request went through a commission and was approved by the grand duke in person, who decided case by case how much the family had to pay.
Giotto’s two chapels
At the end of the right arm of the transept, side by side, are the Peruzzi Chapel and the Bardi Chapel, both frescoed by Giotto between 1320 and 1325.
The Peruzzi holds the stories of Saint John the Baptist and Saint John the Evangelist. The Bardi holds the stories of Saint Francis. These are works of the painter’s old age, made after the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, and the difference is audible: the scenes are broader, the painted architecture more solid, and the groups of people have a composure Padua did not yet have.
Look in particular at the death of Saint Francis in the Bardi. The friars bending over the body do not weep theatrically: one touches the wound in his side, another brings a hand to his face, a third looks away. Giotto is doing the thing for which art history puts him at the beginning of everything, that is painting people who have weight, space around them and a recognisable feeling. I have written about him at greater length in the article on Giotto di Bondone.
Please note: the frescoes in the two chapels were whitewashed in the eighteenth century and rediscovered and restored in the nineteenth with methods we would not use today. Some parts are repainted, and the surface is compromised in more than one place. Knowing this you look better, instead of coming away disappointed.
Cimabue’s Crucifix and the flood of 1966
In the museum of the Opera, laid out in the convent refectory, is the most painful object in Florence.
The Crucifix by Cimabue, painted around 1265-1270, is a shaped cross more than three and a half metres high. On 4 November 1966 the Arno burst its banks and Santa Croce, which stands at the lowest point of the city, was one of the worst hit areas: the water rose above four metres and stayed in the refectory for hours. The wood absorbed the water, swelled, and the paint layer came away.
The crucifix was saved and restored, but the losses are irreversible and visible to the naked eye: half the body of Christ is a pale surface of gesso, with the colour surviving in islands. The restoration did not reconstruct what was missing, and that was a decision.
This is why the work became the symbol of the flood, far more than any photograph of the submerged city. Looking at it today means seeing at once a thirteenth-century masterpiece and the damage done to it, with neither hiding the other.
Donatello’s Cavalcanti Annunciation
On the right wall of the nave, inside an aedicule, is a high relief of around 1435 that is one of the strangest things Donatello ever made.
The Cavalcanti Annunciation is carved in pietra serena, the grey, cheap stone that Florence uses for cornices and columns, and then gilded in several places. It is an unusual combination: architectural material treated as sculptural material, and richness applied over a deliberately humble surface.
The group is all in the gesture. The angel has just knelt, the Virgin rises and turns back surprised, almost alarmed, the book still in her hand. There is none of the calm of painted Annunciations: there is an interruption.
Brunelleschi’s Pazzi Chapel
From the first cloister you can see, at the far end, a small building with a columned portico. It is the Pazzi Chapel, designed by Filippo Brunelleschi and built from the 1440s onwards.
It is a square room covered by an umbrella dome, its walls articulated with the same two materials as the Old Sacristy at San Lorenzo: grey pietra serena for the lines and white plaster for the surfaces. There is nothing else. The only notes of colour are Luca della Robbia’s glazed roundels with the apostles.
The reason to come is that here you understand what Brunelleschi meant by architecture, better than under the dome of the Duomo, which is a technical feat before it is a room. Here there is only a proportion, repeated, and the fact that it works.
The cloister around it, with its lawn and cypresses, is also the quietest spot in central Florence on an August day.
Practical information
Data checked on 28 August 2026 on the official website of the Opera di Santa Croce, santacroceopera.it. Prices and hours change: check again before you travel, and look at the notices page too, because the visitor route is altered fairly often.
Where it is. The complex faces piazza Santa Croce, ten minutes on foot from Piazza della Signoria.
Tickets. The full ticket costs 10 euros. The reduced ticket costs 6 euros and applies to young people aged 12 to 17, university students, schools and groups of 15 to 35 people. Entry is free for children up to 11, for residents of the Comune di Firenze, for disabled visitors with a companion and for Firenze Card holders. Buying online adds a booking fee of 1 euro.
Opening hours. From Monday to Saturday the complex opens 09.30-17.30. On Sundays and holy days of obligation it opens 14.00-17.30. Last admission is at 17.00 and the basilica closes at 17.20 to help visitors leave.
Free days. Entry is free on a number of fixed dates through the year, among them 1 January, Easter, 15 August, 14 September for the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, 4 October for Saint Francis and 26 December. On those days the hours are 14.00-17.30 and last admission is at 16.30. The complex is closed on 25 December.
A little-known advantage. Keeping your Santa Croce ticket gets you reduced entry to Casa Buonarroti, the Museo Horne and the Museo Galileo, all three within ten minutes on foot.
How long you need. For the basilica, Giotto’s chapels, the museum and the two cloisters allow an hour and a half. The audio guide can also be hired online and exists in Italian, English, French, Spanish and German.
A tip. Go in during the afternoon, when the light comes through the transept windows and the two Giotto chapels are legible without artificial lighting. And bear in mind that this is a working church: during services the route may be shortened.
What to see nearby
Santa Croce is the eastern end of the historic centre and stands ten minutes from Piazza della Signoria, so it fits well into the second day of the itinerary on what to see in Florence in two days.
If the tombs caught your interest, Michelangelo’s other Florentine marbles are at the Bargello National Museum, eight minutes away on foot, and at the Medici Chapels, where he designed and carved an entire sacristy. His full story is in the article on Michelangelo Buonarroti.
Photo credits. Facade: Palickap, CC BY 4.0, from Wikimedia Commons. Bardi Chapel: Prof. Mortel, CC BY 2.0, from Wikimedia Commons. Cimabue’s Crucifix: Rufus46, CC BY-SA 3.0, from Wikimedia Commons. Cavalcanti Annunciation: Sailko, CC BY 3.0, from Wikimedia Commons. Pazzi Chapel: MenkinAlRire, CC BY-SA 4.0, from Wikimedia Commons.
