The bell of this abbey marked the rhythm of 's day. In he has an ancestor look back on the Florence of old, and the man recalls how the Badia rang the hours when the city rose and sat down to eat, .
The monastery was already three hundred years old by then, founded by a countess for the soul of her husband, and it held so much land that the city wanted to tax it. The six-sided tower rising above you has stood here since the thirteenth century, and it is still the landmark that marks this corner of the centre.
A little over fifty years after his death, Florence did something remarkable. The city paid , the writer who had championed Dante's work, to read aloud from the Comedy in public and explain what it said, in Italian, for anyone who cared to come in. This happened in 1373, in a church a few streets from here, and it was the first time a city gave a poem back to its people in this way.
Diagonally across from the abbey stands the heavy block with its battlements and inner courtyard.
Sources. Story: Badia Fiorentina, Firenze (storia dell'abbazia); Treccani (Giovanni Boccaccio, lectura Dantis 1373) Photos: Badia Fiorentina, campanile, via Wikimedia Commons, photo Sailko, CC BY 3.0
