Opera del Duomo Museum

This guide to the Opera del Duomo Museum in Florence opens with an elderly Michelangelo taking a hammer to his own unfinished Pieta, a work he had spent eight years carving in secret for his own future tomb in Rome. You'll hear about the flinty marble that fought him from the first chisel stroke, and about the hidden self-portrait tucked into the sculpture's grieving figures. The guide weighs several theories for why, at seventy-two, he wanted the group destroyed, from an exhausted servant's pressure to a fear tied to the Inquisition's hunt for his religious circle.