I can’t be the only one who wanders around Florence trying to picture what it would have been like in the past, as a thriving Renaissance metropolis. The little piazza San Pier Maggiore, near Santa Croce, is one of the most tantalising places in that respect: on one side of the square, between the modern-day shops, cafés and apartments, an elegant portico stands, an intriguing hint of the piazza’s past life. This seventeenth-century portico is almost the only visible remainder of the Church of San Pier Maggiore, built around 1300 and destroyed in 1784.
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