The Neighbourhood Church

The front of this church is raw brick, with no facing at all, which leaves the richest parish in Florence looking strangely out of place among all the marble around it.

San Lorenzo was the church of the neighbourhood where the Medici lived, and from the early fifteenth century the family paid for its rebuilding to a design by Brunelleschi. Whoever funds a church decides who gets buried there, and so a parish church became their family tomb.

Inside, right below the dome, there is a round stone bearing the family coat of arms and the words father of the fatherland. That is where Cosimo lies, placed deliberately at the centre of the building and kept out of any chapel of his own, so that every service took place literally above him. A later Medici even had Michelangelo design a marble facade for the front, which never came to be.

We walk around the church to the back, where the entrance to the burial chapels lies.