San Lorenzo is the Medici family church — the church they paid to rebuild, the church where their bodies are buried.
Brunelleschi redesigned the interior: grey pietra serena columns on white plaster, mathematical proportions, classical serenity.
It became the template for Renaissance religious architecture.
Behind the church, Michelangelo designed a new sacristy as a Medici mausoleum — all reclining figures representing the passage of time, Lorenzo's tomb topped with Dawn and Dusk and Giuliano's with Day and Night.
He also designed the Laurentian Library upstairs, including a staircase so strange that architectural historians are still arguing about it.
Michelangelo left Florence in 1534 and never returned.
When he died in Rome thirty years later, at 88, the Florentines smuggled his body out of the city in a bale of hay to bring him home — and buried him here, at Santa Croce.
Fun fact: he left instructions that he wanted to be buried in Florence.
For once, they did what he asked.
