On February 5, 1445, a cloaked figure carrying a newborn strode across the cobblestones of Florence’s piazza della Santissima Annunziata. Since it was broad daylight, a curious onlooker might have noticed the infant’s swaddling, which was probably the stracci, rags of the poor, not the sumptuous fabric of the silk weavers guild, whose profits had paid for the grand new foundling home about to receive the child: the Hospital of the Innocents, or Innocenti, as it is called. Just down the road from the piazza stood the towering egg-shaped Duomo created by Filippo Brunelleschi, the hot-tempered genius who had designed what was to become her new home.
After arriving at the loggia, the messenger—perhaps the baby’s mother or father, a relative or a stranger paid to execute this dread task—deposited the infant in the pila, the empty holy water font, beneath the arches, then departed without a word. There the three-day-old child lay, waiting for someone to come outside and claim it. In the years to come, the ritual would become a familiar sight to anyone venturing into the piazza, even during the bustle of the workday when half of the foundlings were abandoned, which suggests just how socially acceptable the practice quickly became.
A simple notice in the opening page of the Innocenti’s registry recorded the arrival of the initial unknown child, giving her a new identity: “Agata Smeralda is the name of the first girl come to our Hospital, on Friday, Saint Agata’s Day, at one p.m.” The sickly Agata died just months later, but despite her brief life, she remains the symbol of the Innocenti to this day, marking the start of a revolution in childcare. Within a year of her arrival, 90 children were left at the Innocenti, whose spread quickly, leading a Florentine official to comment in 1446, “It seems likely that almost all the little children of this sort will be abandoned [in the Innocenti] in the future.” In the next two decades, 2,000 more were left at the Innocenti. Over the following five centuries, it would go on to care for nearly 400,000 children, making it one of the greatest humanitarian achievements in all of the Renaissance.
The Innocenti represented a landmark moment in the history of childhood. For the first time, castaway children became wards of a public institution that pledged to care for them and at times even educate them in the revolutionary manner of the Renaissance humanist Vincenzo Borghini, a close collaborator of Giorgio Vasari and one of the most learned scholars of his time. During his priorate of 1552 to 1580, some orphaned boys were taught the liberal arts as well as painting and music. But then as always in the Innocenti’s history, one child’s step forward was countered by another’s step backward: Borghini’s suffocatingly monitored women—he once condescendingly referred to them as ebbri polli, headless chickens—enjoyed few educational freedoms and endured repressive measures that culminated in their open revolt a century later.
The degree to which the Innocenti “saved” its nearly 400,000 orphans remains an open question. Its lack of access to reliable public funding caused perpetual financial crises and spiraling debts. Disease often spread at dangerous levels within its overcrowded walls. Self-serving administrators sometimes burnished their reputations by spending funds on expensive works of art while feeding their charges bread and water. Wet nurses paid to nurture infants often used them as cash cows, neglecting them to the point of starvation or continuing to collect payments on their behalf long after they had perished from mistreatment. As a Catholic institution beholden to papal influence, the Innocenti denied unmarried pregnant women control over their own bodies, forcing them to give birth in often perilous circumstances. As a result of these inefficient and inhumane practices, the mortality rate for infants inside the orphanage was at times as bad if not worse than the one outside it.
But, in the aggregate, the Innocenti’s hard-won advances are undeniable. In general, an infant’s odds of survival vastly improved inside the Innocenti, which provided a baseline of care, education and medical services to children who otherwise might have been left to die from exposure, neglect or abuse. In the Renaissance and afterward, the Innocenti’s fame spread because there were so many “firsts” attached to it: it was the first institution devoted exclusively to the care of abandoned children, a pioneer in surrounding its charges with beautiful art and the site for groundbreaking discoveries in pediatric medicine, among other advances.
Today, the Innocenti is one of the most culturally significant sites in all of Florence, housing a collection of works by Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Piero di Cosimo and other leading names of the Renaissance, on view to visitors from around the world. Crucially, as it exhibits its creative treasures, the 21st-century Innocenti also openly confronts its past, warts and all, through programs and exhibitions that explore the torments of those it failed as well as the triumphs of those it rescued.
For the first time ever, the children who entered the Innocenti benefited from what Jacob Burckhardt, who helped formulate the concept of the Renaissance in the 19th century, called the era’s “many-sided” approach: new educational theories predicated upon a rediscovery of ancient thought, a belief in the transformative power of art and a faith in the capacity of civic virtue to redress public problems. The Innocenti’s children did not always survive the brutal conditions of their birth, nor did they always receive treatment worthy of the principles that led to the foundling home’s creation. But their ghosts live on as testaments to how history’s gittatelli, discarded children, suddenly became trovatelli, discovered ones, when they passed below Brunelleschi’s arches.
