Orsanmichele

I don't even remember what I set off looking for when I set off on our first afternoon in Florence. I was probably just trying to orient myself, looking for the cathedral and being able to place other buildings that I might want to visit. And, in an increasingly common turn of events that I hope I can turn into a metaphor for something significant rather than an embarrassing facet of my personality, I got distractedly lost. There was this big square building with statutes of saints, etc, outside. Add the sign and the beggar outside, and I knew I was right outside of a church. So I poked my head in. It happens.

The inside is also just a square building, but pretty well decorated. Then you look to the side and you notice this huge cage of gold and curly things. It's a tabernacle around a picture of Mary and Baby Jesus (yes, Baby Jesus gets two capital letters. Don't ask me why). On the left, there's an altar to St. Anne (the mother of Mary, grandmother of Jesus, according to wikipedia [not attested to in the canoncial gospels, which is why most of us don't know what that is... I think {don't tell me all my friends secretly knew of St. Anne and never told me!}]). My parenthesis are getting ridiculous.

It's quiet and cool and nice. There was this guy walking around with a nametag, which made me think he was an official sort of person, but then he stopped to read the sign explaining the history of the building and this made me think that he just stopped in on his way back to work, which made me think even more of him. Then he stopped someone from taking a picture and blew that illusion. Still, as far as church guards go, he's one of the nicer ones I've met. And he did read the sign, which is more interest than most church guards I've seen.

The history of the church is actually pretty interesting. It started out as a granary, or a place to store and distribute grain, but then someone drew a picture of Mary on a pillar. People started to pay their respects to the new picture of Mary just as do for all the ones on the street corners, and, after a miracle happened, the number of devoted grew so large that they couldn't use the room as a granary anymore. They moved the grain upstairs and the chutes they used to distribute it to the ground floor can still be seen.

Eventually, the guilds in Florence turned the whole thing into a church (now with a museum on the second floor) and commissioned Florentine artists to design each guild's contribution to the church. The statues on the outside of the building drew me in. I didn't take pictures, but Wikipedia can show them to you better than me if you click here! Donatello gets to make another appearance in my blog, which is a total win.

I love this church's story. I love that the current building was made to be a place of commerce and that the faithful turned it into a holy place. So many of the buildings I see were built for the purpose of housing a church. It's wonderful to see one that grew into that duty. Even though it might now just be a stop for tired sightseers, to whom any cool quiet place out of the sun is a welcome respite, at one point in time, faithful people caused businessmen to change their plans. And I like seeing that.