San Marco Museum guided visit
The San Marco Museum includes most of the ambiences of the Dominican convent designed by Michelozzo - one of the greatest architects of the Renaissance - and commissioned by Cosimo I de' Medici. The convent, where the Dominican monks still live, is one of the most distinguished examples of Florentine architecture of the 15th century.
The museum is developed in various evocative halls, containing one of the world's most famous cycle of paintings by the Dominican monk Beato Angelico, one of the greatest exponents of the Florentine Renaissance.
The tour begins in the elegant Cloister of St. Anthony, place of peace and spirituality and center of the monastic life, where you can find some doors with frescoed lunettes that lead to the ancient halls hosting many wonderful works on wood and frescoes by Beato Angelico.
The visit proceeds with the great refectory, the old kitchen and the services areas which display the paintings of Fra Bartolomeo, another important painter and Dominican monk who lived in the convent in the early 1500. In the small refectory is instead preserved a magnificent fresco by Domenico Ghirlandaio, a great artist of the 1500, depicting the Last Supper.
Upstairs you'll visit of the monks' cells in which you can admire the incomparable frescoes that Beato Angelico painted for his confreres monks. Among the few not painted cells, particularly worthy of interest is the one where the famous friar Girolamo Savonarola lived: passionate speaker, he preached against the corruption and decay of morals of the clergy, ending his life hanged and burned at the stake in Piazza della Signoria.
The tour finally ends in the suggestive ambiences of the library, famous for the incomparable purity of its Renaissance architecture.
