You've reached Santa Croce — the enormous church with the marble front, facing the wide square. Inside, it holds the most extraordinary collection of the dead in Italy. They call it the Pantheon of Florence. But I don't want you thinking of it as a room full of graves, because every one of these tombs is really a story about a life, and about how strangely this city treated the people it now can't stop bragging about.
Start with Michelangelo. He died in Rome, at eighty-eight — a very old man who had spent his last decades away, and who desperately wanted to come home to Florence to be buried. The problem was that Rome wanted to keep him. He was too famous. So his nephew solved it the only way anyone could: he had Michelangelo's body smuggled out of Rome, hidden inside a bale of merchandise, disguised as ordinary cargo, and shipped quietly north to Florence. The greatest artist of the age came home to his city as contraband, packed in a crate.
Then there's Galileo, and this one you sh
ould hold still for. Galileo died having been convicted of heresy by the Inquisition for the crime of saying the Earth moves around the sun — which it does. Because of that conviction, the Church forbade him a Christian burial and any public monument. So for nearly a century, one of the founders of modern science was stashed in a small side room of this church, out of sight, unmarked. Only much la
