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You can buy everything from amber to reindeer skins at the Christmas market (Mercato di natale) in the Piazza Santa Croce from the beginning of December.
CNN: The story
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In honoring illustrious figures of Italian culture and politics, as well as the Florentine banking families whose names still grace the chapels they paid to decorate, Santa Croce ("Holy Cross") embraces and claims them as its own.
WSJ: A Heavenly View From On High | Basilica of Santa Croce | Agnolo Gaddi | By Francis X. Rocca
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Cleaning the Santa Croce frescoes, which took more than five years, has revealed long-obscure details, such as the gilding in an angel's halo, the blue background of a field of stars, and the distinctive foliage of various trees.
WSJ: A Heavenly View From On High | Basilica of Santa Croce | Agnolo Gaddi | By Francis X. Rocca
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For more than six centuries, the brilliantly frescoed walls of Florence's Basilica of Santa Croce functioned as what its current rector, Father Antonio Di Marcantonio, calls "medieval PowerPoint": scenes from the Bible and saints' lives illustrating the sermons that Franciscan friars preached to largely illiterate congregations.
WSJ: A Heavenly View From On High | Basilica of Santa Croce | Agnolo Gaddi | By Francis X. Rocca
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Hence the excitement over the recent cleaning of the frescoes in Santa Croce's main chapel and the news that the restorers' scaffolding will remain in place for most of 2013, allowing visitors to see Agnolo Gaddi's late-14th-century fresco cycle, "The Legend of the True Cross, " from the vantage point of the artist himself.
WSJ: A Heavenly View From On High | Basilica of Santa Croce | Agnolo Gaddi | By Francis X. Rocca
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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.
WSJ: A Heavenly View From On High | Basilica of Santa Croce | Agnolo Gaddi | By Francis X. Rocca