Galleria dell’Accademia di Firenze

This guide to the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence opens in 1527, during an uprising against the Medici, when a bench thrown from a rooftop shatters the left arm of Michelangelo's David into pieces on the cobbles below. It follows the young Giorgio Vasari's later claim that he braved the riot to rescue the fragments, and reaches back further to the block of marble itself — abandoned for twenty-five years and dismissed by other sculptors as the Giant before Michelangelo took the commission at twenty-six. Best heard standing close, looking up at the statue's left leg.