The story
In one room of the museum at the Innocenti, visitors open small drawers one at a time. Each holds a token, a medal, a ribbon, a scrap of fabric, left with a baby so that a parent might one day prove the child was theirs. There are 140 of them on show, and they explain what this building on Florence's Piazza della Santissima Annunziata was for.
It was a foundling hospital. Florence's silk guild commissioned it in 1419 from Filippo Brunelleschi, the architect of the cathedral dome, and his arcade of nine round arches along the square is often described as the first building of the Renaissance. The hospital opened in 1445, and the first baby was left there on 5 February that year. Parents who could not keep a child left it anonymously, at first in a stone basin under the arcade and later at a turning wheel, and the hospital raised it. Before going in, look up at the arcade. Between the arches sit blue glazed terracotta roundels of swaddled infants by Andrea della Robbia, added around 1490.
The museum reopened in 2016 after a long renovation and keeps the art the hospital gathered over the centuries. Its centrepiece is Domenico Ghirlandaio's Adoration of the Magi, painted in the late 1480s for the hospital's church, with the massacre of the innocents playing out in its background and a predella beneath by his collaborator Bartolomeo di Giovanni. Nearby is a Madonna and Child with an Angel by the young Sandro Botticelli. The building still works for children, as the home of a UNICEF research office.
