Florence is often approached through its large forms: the dome, the piazzas, the churches, the museums, the view from above.

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But there is another Florence, smaller and closer to the body. It appears at eye level, or a little above it, on the corner of a street, beside a doorway, under a small arch, between a drainpipe and a street sign.

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These are the street tabernacles of Florence: small devotional images placed on the outer walls of buildings, often at corners, crossings, or thresholds. Some are carefully framed in stone. Others are faded, almost absorbed into the wall. Many show the Madonna and Child; others include saints, lamps, flowers, or only the traces of older forms of care.

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They are easy to miss, partly because they do not ask to be visited. They belong to the street.

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In medieval and early modern Florence, these images were not simply decoration. They marked places of passage, protection, memory, and local devotion. They could be found on houses, workshops, public buildings, and street corners; in some cases they were accompanied by lamps, giving both spiritual and practical light to the city at night. One source counts more than 1,200 tabernacles across Florence, especially in narrow streets and on corners, most of them dedicated to the Virgin Mary.

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What interests me about them is not only their religious meaning, though that matters. It is also their position. They interrupt the ordinary surface of the city. A wall becomes something more than a wall. A corner, usually a place we cross without thinking, becomes a place of attention.

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To notice them is to walk differently. One begins to look not only at façades, but at edges; not only at famous buildings, but at the smaller agreements between architecture, belief, and daily life. Florence stops being a sequence of destinations and becomes a field of signs.

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Some tabernacles are still very visible. Others have been damaged, restored, replaced, or half-forgotten. This, too, is part of their presence. They remind us that the city is not only what has been officially preserved, but also what has been lived with, neglected, touched, repaired, and passed by.

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A particularly powerful example is the tabernacle at the corner of Via dell’Isola delle Stinche and Via Ghibellina. The name recalls the old Stinche prison, once located in this area, near the present-day Teatro Verdi. The fresco, painted in the seventeenth century by Giovanni da San Giovanni, shows an act of mercy towards a prisoner: a small image on a street corner, but also a trace of punishment, charity, and the life of the city around confinement.

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Another example, in Via Guelfa, preserves an image of the Holy Family with Saint John the Baptist as a child and Saint Roch, a saint often associated with protection against plague. Here again, the tabernacle is not only an object to identify; it is a small survival of fear, devotion, and ordinary hope placed directly into the street.

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A walk through Florence can easily become a search for the exceptional. The tabernacles suggest another possibility: that the city may reveal itself through repetition, modesty, and small acts of looking.

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The next time you turn a corner in Florence, pause before moving on. Look up, but not too far. There may be a small image there, quietly holding the street together.

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Possible walk note
Some of these tabernacles can be encountered naturally while walking through Santa Croce, Sant’Ambrogio, San Lorenzo, or the smaller streets between the centre and the edges of the old city. They are not a route in themselves, perhaps, but a way of changing the route.