Oratorio di San Niccolò del Ceppo

Behind a plain door on Via de' Pandolfini, in the centre of Florence, the Company of San Niccolò del Ceppo still keeps its oratory. The brotherhood goes back to the 1300s and is named after the ceppo, a hollowed tree trunk with a slot for alms. In 1785, when Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo of Tuscany dissolved most of the city's confraternities, this was one of the few he spared, because of its charitable work.

The members moved into this hall in 1561 and went on decorating it for more than 170 years. The Florentine painter Francesco Curradi frescoed the altar wall in 1610, and Giovanni Domenico Ferretti finished the ceiling in honour of Saint Nicholas in 1734.

The oldest treasure predates the hall. The friar-painter Fra Angelico's Crucifixion with Saints Nicholas and Francis, painted around 1430, once stood above the altar. Florence's restoration workshop, the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, cleaned it between 2016 and 2018, and it now hangs in the sacristy of an oratory that opens to visitors only on a limited schedule.