Opificio delle Pietre Dure

This guide to the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence opens with a four-meter Cimabue crucifix floating loose in the mud after the Arno flooded on November 4, 1966, and traces how it ended up here. It goes back to 1588, when Grand Duke Ferdinando I founded this workshop to cut and inlay semi-precious stone for the Medici family's own tombs, and follows three centuries of craftsmen piecing stone into pictures so precise the seams disappear. The old tools, workbenches and stone samples from that original trade are still on display near the entrance.