Florence - Hospital of the Innocents

(Local Name: Spedale degli Innocenti) In 1419 the guild of silk merchants and tailors commissioned the architect Filippo Brunelleschi, who built the dome of the cathedral, to build a foundling hospital, the "Hospital of the Innocents", equating the foundlings with the slaughtered first-born of Bethlehem. Until 1875 mothers who wanted to leave their new-born babes anonymously in the care of the orphanage could put them in the "ruota", a revolving wooden cylinder at the end of the portico.

The Spedale degli Innocenti marks the debut of Renaissance architecture in Florence.