Santo Spirito: the artisan Oltrarno
Brunelleschi's plain-faced basilica, the morning square, and the workshops that still smell of glue and gesso. This is a Claude-drafted route awaiting the editor's walk.

1. Piazza Santo Spirito
Start in the square before it fills. There's a small produce market under the plane trees most weekday mornings and a café or two putting out chairs. Sit with the blank facade in front of you and the workshops at your back — this is the *Oltrarno* doing its actual job, not performing for anyone.

2. Basilica di Santo Spirito
Brunelleschi's last church, and the one where you can read his geometry cleanly — a forest of grey *pietra serena* columns, the whole thing built on a grid you can almost pace out. The facade outside is famously, gloriously blank. Step in; it's free and usually calm.

3. Via Santo Spirito
Walk east along the street the *artigiani* (workshops) gave their name to. Gilders, restorers, frame-makers and upholsterers still work behind open doors — peer in, but don't treat it as a museum; these are people at a bench. The palaces above the shopfronts are mostly 16th-century.

4. Via dei Velluti
Duck down the short lane named for the velvet-weavers who once worked it. It's narrow, quiet, and barely changed in plan since the medieval city. A two-minute detour that tells you more about the quarter than any plaque.

5. Santa Felicita
The little church at the foot of the Vasari Corridor, holding Pontormo's *Deposition* in the Capponi chapel just inside the door — one of the strangest, most luminous paintings in the city, in acid pinks and blues. Drop a coin in the light box for it. You'll likely be alone.

6. Ponte Vecchio approach
Finish where the lanes spill out toward the river and the old bridge. You don't have to cross it — the point is the approach, the jewellers' shutters, and the Arno glinting between them. Buses and the rest of the centre are a few steps over the water.

Santo Spirito: the artisan Oltrarno