Look at the front of this church. It's bare. Rough brown brick, blank and unfinished, like the builders knocked off for lunch five centuries ago and never came back. This is San Lorenzo, the Medici family church — the parish they worshipped in, baptized in, and were buried under. And that naked brick face is one of the great quiet embarrassments of the richest family in Europe.
Because there was supposed to be a front. Michelangelo — Florence's own, the man who carved the David — won the commission to design a glorious marble façade for this church, and he threw himself at it. He spent years up in the mountains at Carrara, choosing and quarrying the stone himself. Then the money shifted, the politics shifted, the contract collapsed, and not one slab of that marble ever went up. The family that bankrolled the entire Renaissance never got around to finishing the front of its own church. It's stayed raw brick ever since.
Step inside — or just picture it — and the story turns from money
to blood. This is where they lie. Cosimo the Elder is buried directly below the high altar, at the exact center of the church, so that every Mass said in here is, technically, said over him. And his grandson is here too. Lorenzo. History calls him Lorenzo the Magnificent, and he earned it — poet, art fanatic, the sharpest political mind of his age.
Lorenzo also survived the single most audacious
