Baptistry

In order to begin to understand what magic made the Renaissance first bloom by the Arno, look here; this ancient and thoroughly mysterious building is the egg from which Florence’s golden age was hatched. By the quattrocento Florentines firmly believed their baptistry was originally a Roman temple to Mars, a touchstone linking them to a legendary past.

History

Dante, like every other Florentine, would of course have been baptized ‘nel mio bel San Giovanni’, following the tradition by which every Florentine child was baptised communally on the Annunciation—also the start of the new year in the Florentine calendar. In the Inferno (canto 19, 13–21), he describes the fate of the simoniacs in hell, stuffed head-down into pits; it reminded him of an incident from his younger days, when he tipped over one of the deep baptismal urns here to save a child who had crawled in and was drowning.