Badia Fiorentina

Step through the small door on Via del Proconsolo, across the street from the Bargello, and you are inside the oldest monastery in Florence. Willa, a widowed countess of Tuscany, founded it in 978, and her son Hugo, the margrave who ruled the region, lies here in a marble tomb carved centuries later by the sculptor Mino da Fiesole.

The painting most visitors come for is The Vision of Saint Bernard by Filippino Lippi, son of the painter Fra Filippo Lippi. He made it around 1486 for a family chapel at the Campora monastery outside the Porta Romana, and the patron, Piero del Pugliese, kneels in the lower corner. When that church was damaged during the siege of Florence in 1529 and 1530, the panel was moved here, and here it stayed. The saint is writing at a rough lectern in a rocky landscape when the Virgin appears to him, and behind his shoulder a small demon gnaws at its chain.

Above the church rises the slender six-sided bell tower, finished around 1330. Dante, whose family lived a few streets away, remembers the abbey's bells in the Divine Comedy as the ones that rang the hours for the old walled city. Upstairs, the Cloister of the Oranges keeps a 15th-century fresco cycle of the life of Saint Benedict, and the abbey is still a working monastery, home since 1998 to the Monastic Fraternities of Jerusalem, who sing vespers here every evening.