San Marco Square

The façade of San Marco church and the adjoining museum form the square’s backdrop. The museum is dedicated to the Renaissance painter Fra Angelico, who lived and worked here. Following the example of the mendicant orders, the Sylvestrines, Benedictine monks reformed by St Sylvester Gozzolini, founded their city monastery with its church and forecourt in 1299. San Marco’s fame, however, is linked to the Dominicans, who moved here from 1436, Michelozzo’s rebuilding around 1437–1450 for Cosimo the Elder de’ Medici, and Fra Angelico’s frescoes. In the fifteenth century the square was therefore one of the city’s religious and cultural centres. It faced the famous Garden of San Marco, an almost legendary place where Lorenzo the Magnificent kept ancient sculptures studied by leading Florentine artists, including Michelangelo. Today only the flower shop in Via Cavour recalls it, between the Palazzina della Livia and the former Court of Appeal in the sixteenth-century Casino di San Marco. The square changed greatly over the centuries, culminating in the eighteenth century under Pietro Leopoldo of Lorraine with completion of the church façade and rearrangement of the surrounding buildings.