The Due Torri Hotels group, which includes historic properties such as the Grand Hotel Majestic già Baglioni in Bologna, the Bernini Palace in Florence, Hotel Bristol Palace in Genoa and Due Torri Hotel in Verona, has launched a literary initiative for its guests. At evening turndown, a Goodnight Booklet is placed on the bed. This small booklet contains a story tied to a local landmark written by a curated selection of writers. In Florence, the featured story, written by Elena Dallorso, Deputy Editor of AD, brings to life the Spedale degli Innocenti, one of the most iconic sites of the Italian Renaissance (The Good night Books, Edizioni Minerva, 2025)
Agata Smeralda
It was a cold day on 5 February 1445, even though it had finally stopped raining. Monna Antonia had decided to leave the house with her newborn baby, making the most of the pale winter afternoon sun that was trying to warm Florence. The little girl was frail, she seemed to be struggling to breathe and Monna Antonia certainly had neither the time nor the means to take care of another mouth to feed.
Her godmother had told her about it: in the square of the Santissima Annunziata, the master builder of the dome of the Cathedral had built a hospital where little children were cared for and fed. Walking along the less frequented streets, avoiding the gaze of the few passers-by, she crossed the city with her bundle wrapped in a rag of worn wool, a linen handkerchief covering the baby’s little head and she arrived at the square. She didn’t expect anything like this. On the right side of the church, where everyone said the painting of the Annunciation had been done by an angel, a long portico raised on nine steps was supported by elegant, slender columns. Higher up, on the façade, on ceramic tiles with a blue background, swaddled infants made it clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was the place.
Monna Antonia, whom everyone called Giovanna, placed the newborn and her few possessions (“two pieces of torn coarse cloth smock for each wool rag, four wool rags, one piece of linen rag for the head, two new swaddling clothes”) in the holy water font under the portico, pulled the bell rope to alert the hospital, said that the baby had been baptized, and, wrapping her cloak around her, left.
From that moment on, the newborn was Agata, named after the saint of the day, protector of nursing mothers, and Smeralda, to emphasize the preciousness of the life of any human being. She was the first child to enter the Hospital. Agata and Smeralda, to inspire admiration, wonder, gratitude.
A few days after her arrival, she was given to a wet nurse in Castelfiorentino, in the hope that her health would improve. But that family was also poor and, despite collecting the 50 florins for looking after the little girl, they returned her to the Hospital in a worse condition than she had been given.
There was another one, a foster family, and each time Agata Smeralda brought with her something extra, a cloak or clean swaddling clothes, but not even these new clothes could help her survive. She died at the Innocenti on 22 December 1445 («she died in her house in the hospital on December XXII 1445 […]»).
But the wheels of the Hospital, now that they had started, never stopped. The organization was precise and functional. Each new arrival was recorded in the Children’s Book, with time, method, sex, presumed or confirmed age, month and year of birth, health and any “sign of recognition”. The newborns were entrusted to internal wet nurses, often poor women, unmarried girls or mothers of children taken in at the Innocenti. To these were also added external wet nurses, country mothers who breastfed the children until they were two years old and kept them with them until they were five or six. Those who survived returned to the Innocenti to learn a trade (the boys), or to do housework for the rich Florentine families, the only way that the girls had to earn a dowry to get married or become nuns.
Beauty that heals
In Florence, children like Agata Smeralda were called gittatelli (orphans). Unwanted, illegitimate, abandoned children, children of sin in most cases, were all welcomed in the city’s hospitals. But in the 15th century, a revolution called the Renaissance was taking place, which put man (and all his talents) at the centre of creation.
A revolution that allowed, for example, a merchant from Prato, Francesco Datini, who was orphaned by both parents at the age of 13, to quickly climb all the steps of the social ladder by founding a system of trading companies with offices in Avignon, Florence, Pisa, Genoa, Barcelona, Valencia and Palma de Mallorca and to become very rich. With only one concern: he had no heir, after losing his family in 1348 to the plague that was ravaging Europe. And also he had arranged in his will the foundation of the “Ceppo dei poveri di Francesco di Marco” (today Casa Pia dei Ceppi), to which he had left over 100,000 gold florins and another 1000 for the construction of a new welfare facility in Florence, in which to welcome the gittatelli and give them an education – introducing the boys to trades and the girls to weaving, embroidery and housework – in order to allow them to become active members of Florentine society. That legacy was paid to the very powerful Arte della Seta (Silk Weavers’ Guild), which undertook the construction of the Ospedale degli Innocenti, in a synergy of intent between politics, the church and merchants: the institute was supported by the corporation, by the public taxes of the Municipality and by the papacy itself, which in a completely exceptional way exempted the institution from some taxes.
The designer was the star architect of the time, Filippo Brunelleschi, who followed the building site from 1419 until the construction of the portico. Then the dome of the Cathedral (or perhaps an offer by the last of the Viscontis to build a fortress in Milan) seemed to him to be a much more prestigious proposition; he handed over the job to his collaborator, Francesco della Luna, who added to the portico of the maestro (who, according to the chronicles of the time, resented it a lot) a floor with windows where children could stay, a space dedicated to women, with its cloister, as well as various decorative elements that did not appear in the initial design. And so the Ospedale degli Innocenti became a “place of beauty”. Even more, a place of beauty as a source of knowledge and care, according to the Renaissance idea.
The children who grew up within these walls spent years among the works of the most important artists of the Florentine Renaissance (all exhibited in the Museum Gallery), from Sandro Botticelli and Piero di Cosimo, from the Della Robbia, whose glazed terracottas still adorn the façade on Piazza della Santissima Annunziata, to Ghirlandaio, whose altarpiece – first in the church of Santa Maria degli Innocenti – is a faithful portrait of the society of the time, from the notables of the Silk Weavers’ Guild, laden with precious fabrics and jewels, to the painter himself and the patron, the prior Francesco Testori.
What is certain is that the Ospedale degli Innocenti marked the official beginning of Florentine Renaissance architecture, and not only for its magnificent proportions and references to antiquity, but above all for its public utility, for being the answer to the social problem of abandoned children. The choice of materials was also revolutionary: grey pietra serena (sandstone) and white plaster, low cost but with a great visual impact, inaugurated the typical, very elegant, two-tone of the Florentine Renaissance.
140 lives
There is a room in the Hospital, just below the level of the square, where the story of Agata Smeralda and all the other “nocentini” becomes tangible. Walking through a series of rooms – which in the 2016 redesign by the architects of Ipostudio include the Historical Archive that illustrates the daily life of the hospital, the childcare, the wet nurses and a hundred or so biographies of the “nocentini” who passed through the institute during the six centuries of its history – you arrive at the Sala dei Segni.
The silence is total. Almost sacred. Under the vaults, as if embraced by an enormous semicircular piece of furniture in light wood, you are inexorably drawn to a series of small drawers all of the same size: each contains a sign of recognition that dates back to the nineteenth century (a medal, a ring, a piece of cloth, a button, often broken in two) that the natural parents of the children put in the Hospital hidden in the swaddling clothes so that they could perhaps, one day, recognize them and embrace them again by recomposing the sign… 140 traces of lives that tell of poverty, shame, desperation, but also hopes and new beginnings. Of abandonment and care.
Today
The Innocenti still exists. And not only as an archive and museum of Renaissance masterpieces, but as a place intended to improve the living conditions of childhood and adolescence, in perfect, humanistic continuity with the first mission of the Hospital.
From reception to the educational services, from research to the documentation of phenomena concerning children and young people, from training to European planning, up to collaboration with subjects and institutions for the support of policies in favour of childhood and adolescence. Within the walls of Brunelleschi there are also three nursery schools and a centre for educational continuity 0-6 years and the UNICEF Research Centre – Innocenti and the Innocenti Library “Alfredo Carlo Moro” specialized in the rights of childhood and adolescence.
A special place in which to experience wonder.
The Author
Elena Dallorso was born in Liguria, raised in Rome and migrated to Milan (for love); she writes for “AD Italia” about houses, people and objects, searching, behind each of these things, for a story that speaks of beauty and passion. After a degree in Theatre History, collaboration with the CNR on the figure of the great actor in the 19th century, an appointment as a lecturer in psychology at the Catholic University of Milan, she took her first steps in TV following legal cases and worked as an editor and head of the press office of an important publishing group before dedicating herself 100% to journalism. She has written about culture, society and travel for national and international newspapers and magazines, from “La Gazzetta di Parma” to “La Stampa”, from “Marie Claire” to “Il Sole 24 Ore” to “Donna Moderna”, from “Meridiani” to “Traveller”. She collaborates with “Vanity Fair” and “Vogue”. She is the author of various novels (published by Feltrinelli), podcasts and screenplays (based on her books and originals) about her passions: cooking, wine and humanity.
Curious to know more about Florence ? read our itinerary off-the-beaten track here