Santa Croce: the basilica and the leather quarter
Michelangelo and Galileo under one roof, a working leather school, and the artisan lanes around them. This is a Claude-drafted route awaiting the editor's walk.

1. Piazza Santa Croce
Start in the long open square the friars used for preaching to crowds — and where Florence still plays *calcio storico*, the brutal Renaissance football match, every June. Stand at the bottom end for the full sweep of the marble facade before you go closer.

2. Basilica di Santa Croce
The Franciscan basilica that doubles as Italy's pantheon — Michelangelo, Galileo and Machiavelli are all buried along the nave, Dante has a monument though Ravenna kept the body. The facade is 19th-century marble bolted onto a 13th-century church; go in for the tombs and Giotto's frescoes in the Bardi chapel. Ticketed; mornings are quietest.

3. Scuola del Cuoio
Behind the basilica, the leather school set up after the war to teach orphans a trade, still working in the friars' old dormitory. Walk through to watch cutters and gilders at the benches; you can buy, but you don't have to — the point is seeing the craft done by hand. Enter from the garden or the church's rear cloister.

4. Via Torta
Slip into the curving lane northwest of the square — *Via Torta* bends because it traces the wall of a Roman amphitheatre that stood here, its oval still legible in the street plan. Walk the curve and read the city's oldest layer under your feet.

5. Sant'Ambrogio market lanes
Northeast into the artisan grid — small leather workshops, bookbinders and frame-gilders working behind open doors, the trades that fed the basilica's school for generations. No single address; just walk the streets between Via de' Macci and the market and look in. Quietest mid-morning.

6. Via dell'Agnolo toward the centre
Cut back west along Via dell'Agnolo and into the centre — the workshops thin into shops, the streets widen, and the route delivers you toward the Duomo and the long walk back to the station. A working-quarter finish rather than a monumental one.

Santa Croce: the basilica and the leather quarter