The statue he smashed

One evening, when Michelangelo was around eighty, he picked up a hammer and smashed the statue he had worked on for years. A servant gathered the pieces and sold them, and a pupil later put the whole thing back together.

It was meant for his own tomb: Christ being taken down from the cross, held up by three figures. For centuries the old man in the hood supporting the body has been read as a self-portrait, which means Michelangelo himself quite literally stands beneath the weight.

Why he smashed it has never been settled. His contemporary Vasari, the painter and biographer of so many Renaissance artists, writes about a vein in the marble that made the work impossible, and about a frustration that often drove him to destruction, since he left other unfinished pieces standing or broke them apart too. Christ's leg is still missing.

The statue stands in the museum behind the cathedral, which also holds the panels from the campanile and the original doors of the Baptistery. You need a ticket for it, usually sold together with the dome and the Baptistery.

On the south side of the square, Via del Proconsolo begins, and halfway along on the left there's a fortress-like block with battlements.