Ospedale degli Innocenti: Brunelleschi's Foundling Hospital
Why is it significant?
Stand under the long arcade on the east side of the square and look up between the arches. Set into the wall is a row of round blue medallions, and in each one a baby, wrapped tight in white swaddling bands, holds out its arms to you.
Key Facts
| Place | Ospedale degli Innocenti: Brunelleschi's Foundling Hospital |
|---|---|
| Address | Piazza della Santissima Annunziata 13, 50121 Firenze FI, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 43.77610, 11.26070 |
| Part of Walk | From the Dome to David: Brunelleschi, Ghiberti and Michelangelo in Florence |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand under the long arcade on the east side of the square and look up between the arches. Set into the wall is a row of round blue medallions, and in each one a baby, wrapped tight in white swaddling bands, holds out its arms to you.
This is the Ospedale degli Innocenti, the hospital of the innocents, built for abandoned children and paid for by the silk merchants' guild. In 1419 they asked Brunelleschi to design it, while his dome was still only a plan. He gave them this loggia: slim grey columns, perfect round arches, every proportion worked out from simple ratios, as calm as a sum. Many historians call it the first building of the Renaissance. The hospital opened in 1445, and the very first child left here was a girl named Agata Smeralda.
At the far left end of the arcade you can still see where the wheel was, a revolving window through which a baby could be passed inside without the parent ever being seen. It stayed in use until 1875. Parents often left a token with the child, half a medal, a ribbon, a scrap of cloth, hoping one day to come back with the other half and claim them. Some of those tokens are displayed in the museum inside, and they are hard to look at for long. Florentine surnames like Innocenti, Nocentini and Degli Innocenti go back to the children raised here.
The blue babies were added decades later by Andrea della Robbia, in glazed terracotta, and they became the symbol of the place. Look across the square, too: a century after Brunelleschi, architects built a second arcade on the opposite side as a mirror image of his, turning a whole piazza into one design. The two bronze fountains with their sea monsters are by Pietro Tacca, from 1629.
The institution never stopped working for children, and today it also hosts UNICEF's research office. Now cross the square towards the bronze horseman and the church portico on its northern side.