Santa Maria Nuova: The Hospital of Beatrice's Father
Why is it significant?
In the little square of Santa Maria Nuova, a long arcaded front runs along one side, and behind it people in white coats hurry about their work, just as people have here for more than seven hundred years. This is a hospital, and it has never stopped being one.
Key Facts
| Place | Santa Maria Nuova: The Hospital of Beatrice's Father |
|---|---|
| Address | Piazza di Santa Maria Nuova 1, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 43.77360, 11.26030 |
| Part of Walk | Dante's Florence: Beatrice, Exile and the Empty Tomb of Santa Croce |
| Generated | Generated |
In the little square of Santa Maria Nuova, a long arcaded front runs along one side, and behind it people in white coats hurry about their work, just as people have here for more than seven hundred years. This is a hospital, and it has never stopped being one.
It was founded in 1288 by a rich Florentine banker, Folco Portinari, and it is the oldest hospital in Florence still in use. Folco had a daughter called Bice, short for Beatrice. According to Boccaccio, it was at a May Day party in the Portinari house in 1274 that a nine-year-old boy called Dante Alighieri first saw her, a girl of about eight in a crimson dress, and was lost for the rest of his life.
They hardly ever spoke. Dante writes that nine years later she greeted him in the street, and that single greeting sent him home to his room in a kind of trance. She married another banker, Simone de' Bardi, and died in 1290, aged about twenty-four, only months after her father. Dante turned his grief into a little book of poems and prose, the Vita Nuova, and promised to write of her what had never been written of any woman. He kept that promise: in the Divine Comedy, Beatrice guides him through Paradise.
Tradition gives the hospital a second founder, Monna Tessa, a servant in the Portinari household, who is said to have urged Folco to build it and gathered women to nurse the sick. Those women became the Oblate, and their old convent just behind the hospital is now a public library, the Biblioteca delle Oblate, with a terrace that looks straight at the dome. Folco himself lies in the hospital church of Sant'Egidio, under the portico in front of you.
Two centuries later Leonardo da Vinci came here to study anatomy. In his notes he describes an old man in this hospital who told him he was more than a hundred years old, and who died quietly a few hours later; Leonardo dissected him to understand so gentle a death. Now head south-west through the old streets to Via del Corso, and turn left into the narrow lane of Via Santa Margherita.