Ospedale degli Innocenti

The Silk Guild of Florence, already patron of Orsanmichele, commissioned Brunelleschi in 1419 to build a hospital for abandoned children, and the nine-bay arcade he raised on the Piazza della Santissima Annunziata became a model for early Renaissance architecture before the Duomo's dome was even finished. Its logic is a single repeated cube: the height of each slender Corinthian column equals the width between them, so bay reads as module and module as building. The blue-and-white glazed terracotta roundels of swaddled infants set between the arches are not Brunelleschi's work at all — Andrea della Robbia added them in 1487, four decades after the arcade opened, and they are now the single most photographed detail on the facade. The hospital took in children through a wheel let into the wall from 1660, so a parent could leave an infant anonymously; the practice ended only in 1875. UNICEF has run its research centre from the building since 1988, alongside a museum of the Renaissance art the institution collected over five centuries.