San Domenico

Frommer's Review

This 1280 church squats a block inside the southern walls of town. The first item on the right as you enter is the tomb of Filippo Lazzari, one of Dante's best friends. The scholar lectures on eternally in the relief panel below. (I like to think his young follower Boccaccio, said to be one of the students here, is the kid stifling a yawn on the right.) The chapel to the left of the high altar contains a Cristofano Allori canvas of St. Domenic Receiving the Rosary, interesting not so much for the painting itself, but for the argument in the background between the artist and the church sacristan over payment for the picture. Benozzo Gozzoli, who died of the plague while on a fresco job here in 1497, is buried in the cloister, which also gives access to several rooms housing detached 13th-century frescoes. The refectory and attached tiny museum house the remaining fragments of Gozzoli's last work, a Journey of the Magi, and a possible early Verrochio St. Jerome. To see all the above if the cloister isn't open, hunt down a sacristan or ring the bell at Piazza San Domenico 1.

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