Piazza San Marco

The square is dominated by the Church and, on the right side of the facade, the Museo di San Marco (Saint Mark Museum, famous for Beato Angelico's Renaissance paintings).

Following the example of the mendicant orders, the Sylvestrines - an order of Benedictine monks reformed by St. Sylvester Gozzolini - founded their urban monastery here in 1299 with a church and the square in front of it. Nevertheless San Marco owes its fame more to the Dominican friars, who established themselves there from 1436, to Michelozzi's reconstruction (c. 1437-1450) commissioned by Cosimo de' Medici "the herlder", and to Beato Angelico's frescoes.

In the fifteenth century the square was one of the religious and cultural centers of the city. Overlooking it were the famous "Gardens of San Marco" the almost legendary location of Lorenzo the Magnificent's collection of antiques sculptures, where the major Florentine artists of the time came to study, among them Michelangelo. Today all that remains is in the flower shop in via Cavour, between the Palazzina della Livia and the Law Courts, on the site of  the sixteenth-century Casino di San Marco. The square has undergone enormous changes in the course of the centuries, cilminating in the eighteenth century, at the time of Leopold II of Lorraine, in the completion of the façade of the church and the renovation of the surrounding buildings.

In the neighborhoods of the square, the famous Academy Gallery