I went totheInvalides, PantheoninParisjust after my visiting Waterloo, so it seemed that I was tracing the life of those celebritiessuch asRousseau, Voltaire and Vitro Hugobesides of Nepoleon.
From there we can see dozens of rectangular slabs set into the pavement, marking the burial places of centuries of Florentine families, and along the walls, funerary monuments to some of the greatest names in Italian history, including Dante, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Galileo and Rossini, which make Santa Croce the Italian equivalent of Paris's Pantheon or London's Westminster Abbey, a shrine to the so-called lay saints of a modern nation-state.