Orsanmichele

Take a good look at this cube of stone: no bell tower, no church facade, and yet it is a church. Its name, Orsanmichele, comes from 'orto di San Michele', the kitchen garden of an old monastery that once stood here.

1A granary with a miraculous Madonna

In the late 13th century this was an open loggia for the grain market, with a much-venerated image of the Virgin. A fire destroyed it in 1304. From 1337 the present building went up: a loggia below and storerooms above, where the city kept grain in case of famine. Soon afterwards the arches were walled in and the ground floor became a church.

2The guilds' contest

The city handed out the outer pillars to the Arti, the guilds that ran Florence. Each one had to pay for a statue of its patron saint. What began as an obligation turned into a prestige contest between bankers, wool merchants, silk makers and armourers, and in the 15th century they hired the best sculptors around: Ghiberti, Donatello, Nanni di Banco, Verrocchio.

Ghiberti's St John the Baptist, finished around 1416 for the cloth merchants' guild, was the first large bronze statue of the Florentine Renaissance.

Today the originals are kept in the museum upstairs and in the Bargello, and copies stand in the niches. Even so, walking around the outside is like strolling through an open-air sculpture gallery.

3What to look for

• The guild coats of arms in roundels above the niches.
• Verrocchio's Doubting Thomas, on the Via dei Calzaiuoli side.
• The walled-up arches, traces of the old grain loggia.