Santa Croce

Santa Croce is the largest Franciscan church in the world, and the burial place of an extraordinary concentration of Italians — Michelangelo, Galileo, Machiavelli, Rossini, Foscolo, and the cenotaph of Dante, who is actually buried in Ravenna. The church is sometimes called the Temple of the Italian Glories; the floor and walls are essentially a memorial to the country's intellectual history.

Photographed in October 2016 in black and white during my first time in Italy. There are very few buildings where the dead are this densely and consequentially gathered; Santa Croce is one of them.