From the street, the Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence is one of the most admired buildings of the early Renaissance. Brunelleschi’s long loggia, with its round arches and blue-and-white roundels of babies, looks like a gentle place. For four centuries it also held a stone turntable in a barred window, and a mother who placed a baby on it could turn it, ring, and leave without ever being seen.
The Horror
The Silk Guild commissioned Filippo Brunelleschi to design the hospital in 1419. It formally opened in 1445, and the first abandoned infant arrived on February 5 of that year. The museum records her as a baby girl named Agata Smeralda.
At first there was a basin at the portico where children were left. In 1660 it was replaced by a rotating wheel, set into a small barred window. The stone crib on the wheel turned inward, so the person leaving the child was not seen, and a bell warned the staff. It stayed in use until the hospital closed the practice in 1875.
Mothers often left a sign. The museum describes half a coin, a pendant, a scrap of cloth or a small cross, kept so that a mother whose circumstances improved could come back and prove the child was hers. Staff recorded each child’s details and its sign. The keepsakes are now displayed in small drawers labelled with each child’s name and date.
Mortality among the children was high. How high is unconfirmed. A figure of around 90 percent dying in the first year is sometimes quoted for Florence, but it does not appear in the sources used here, and no precise rate is given for the Innocenti.
The Legend
The foundling wheel is often credited to Pope Innocent III, who in 1198 is said to have ordered them in foundling homes after seeing dead babies in the Tiber. The Wikipedia account of the wheel gives the 1198 date and the papal order without a citation. The vivid detail of the dead infants in the river is a popular tale, and it is unconfirmed. The Santo Spirito hospital in Rome had a wheel that can still be seen. The Innocenti, a Florentine foundation of the fifteenth century, is not the same institution and was not founded by a pope.
The idea spread. Wheels appeared in Naples, Hamburg, Kassel and Dublin. In France they were legalised by a decree of January 19, 1811, and abolished in 1863, then formally by law in 1904.
The Modern Relic
The hospital building still stands on Piazza della Santissima Annunziata, and a museum now occupies it. Its first floor tells the hospital’s story, with the records, the tokens and the wheel. The statues of Mary and Joseph that once flanked the window are inside the museum. The blue glazed roundels on the loggia are mostly nineteenth-century copies, and the originals are kept inside.
The window itself was closed in 1875. Some of what mothers left behind, half a coin or a scrap of cloth, was kept for a reunion that, in most cases, did not come.
