Medici Chapels (Cappelle Medicee)

The entrance to the Medici chapels leads through the crypt, a dark and austere place where many of the Medici are actually buried, the Archdukes with their jewelled crowns on their heads and their sceptres at their side.

Their main monument to themselves, the family obsession, is just up the steps: the Chapel of the Princes, a stupefying, fabulously costly octagon of death that, as much as the Grand Dukes fussed over it, lends their memory an unpleasant aftertaste of cancerous bric-a-brac that grew and grew.

Perhaps only a genuine Medici could love its insane, trashy opulence; all of Grand Duke Cosimo’s descendants, down to the last, Anna Maria Ludovica, worked like beavers to finish it according to the plans left by Cosimo’s illegitimate son, dilettante architect Giovanni de’ Medici.

Yet even today it is only partially completed, the pietre dure extending only part of the way up the walls. The 19th-century frescoes in the enormous cupola (designed by Bernardo Buontalenti in 1604 and only completed in the 20th century) are a poor substitute for the originally planned Apotheosis of the Medici in lapis lazuli, and the two statues in gilded bronze in the niches over the sarcophagi (each niche large enough to hold a hippopotamus) are nothing like the intended figures to be carved in semi-precious stone.