Loggia del Bigallo: The Republic's Charity
Why is it significant?
Stand at the corner where Via dei Calzaiuoli meets the cathedral square and look at the little marble loggia with two delicate Gothic arches, wedged against the houses. Next to the giants around it, it is easy to miss.
Key Facts
| Place | Loggia del Bigallo: The Republic's Charity |
|---|---|
| Address | Piazza di San Giovanni 1, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 43.77280, 11.25520 |
| Part of Walk | Guilds, Feuds and Bonfires: The Florentine Republic Walk in Florence |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand at the corner where Via dei Calzaiuoli meets the cathedral square and look at the little marble loggia with two delicate Gothic arches, wedged against the houses. Next to the giants around it, it is easy to miss. But this small porch tells you how the Republic looked after the people who fell through its cracks.
The loggia was built in the 1350s for the Misericordia, a confraternity of ordinary citizens devoted to works of mercy. Florence had no welfare state; it had brotherhoods like this one, run by laymen, funded by donations and bequests, which carried the sick to hospital, buried the dead and cared for orphans. Later the building passed to a second brotherhood, the Bigallo, named after a hospice in the hills outside the city, and the name stuck to the loggia.
Under these arches lost and abandoned children were put on show, so that parents could recognise and reclaim them. If nobody came forward within a few days, the confraternity sent them to foster families. It sounds harsh, but in a city of plague, famine and poverty it was a public safety net, in the most public place in town. In 1445 the Silk Guild's new foundling hospital, the Ospedale degli Innocenti, took over much of that work.
Inside, the small museum keeps a fresco of the Madonna of Mercy painted in 1342, sheltering the citizens under her cloak. At her feet lies the oldest known view of Florence: walls, towers, the Baptistery and a cathedral still under construction. It is a portrait of the Republic at the height of its wealth, six years before the Black Death killed perhaps half of its people.
And the Misericordia never stopped. Its brothers once worked in black hooded robes, so that no one could thank them by name, and its headquarters has stood on the cathedral square since the sixteenth century; it still runs ambulances today, one of the oldest charities in the world. Now walk south down Via dei Calzaiuoli, the busy street of the stocking-makers, to a tall stone block ringed with statues.