Santa Croce · Oltrarno
The Hands That Made Florence
You're crossing the river into the district Florence used for work, not for photographs. Behind Santa Croce's neo-Gothic facade there's a star nobody put there by accident, and in a square where fists once drew blood, a date is carved into a marble disc that almost nobody notices. You'll cross the Ponte Vecchio along the way, without stopping — that story already belongs to another route in this same city — to enter Oltrarno, the artisans' district. It's just under 2.5 km and eight stops: here, the difficulty lies in noticing the small things, not the monumental ones.
“This facade looks medieval, matching the rest of the Gothic church, but it's actually 19th-century: it was finished in 1863 by architect Niccolò Matas, who was Jewish, almost 600 years after construction of the basilica began. Right at the centre of the triangular gable, amid the geometric marble decoration, Matas included a figure nobody would expect to find on the front of a Franciscan church: a star formed by two overlapping triangles, one inverted over the other. How many points does that star have?”
This is what the puzzles are like. The rest unlocks once you start playing.
The playing area
- Access to the full trail for 1 year after purchase
- Built-in hint system if you get stuck
- Printable version, in case you’d rather go phone-free
- No signal needed once the trail has loaded