Museum of San Marco

San Marco is a museum almost by accident. It was a working Dominican friary, and in the 1440s one of the friars was Fra Angelico, among the finest painters of the early Renaissance, who covered its walls for his brothers rather than for any public.

Upstairs, each of the small sleeping cells holds a single quiet fresco, a Crucifixion or a Nativity, painted plainly so a monk could pray in front of it without distraction. At the top of the stairs waits his Annunciation, the angel and Mary bowing to each other under a bare vaulted loggia, one of the most reproduced images in Italian art. Because the frescoes are still on the walls they were made for, you meet them exactly where they were meant to be seen.

Later the friary had a darker fame. Its prior in the 1490s was Girolamo Savonarola, the preacher who briefly ruled Florence and burned luxuries in his bonfires of the vanities before he was himself hanged and burned in the square in 1498. His cell and a few of his belongings are still on show.