The SS. Annunziata di Firenze

This guide to the SS. Annunziata basilica in Florence follows the seven-hundred-year-old legend of a friar named Bartolomeo, who struggled again and again to paint the Virgin's face for an Annunciation fresco in twelve fifty-two before exhaustion overtook him. It traces what came after word spread: pilgrims arriving by the thousand with life-size wax figures of themselves, eventually strung by the hundreds from the ceiling above the Chiostrino dei Voti, and the frescoes by Andrea del Sarto and Pontormo that the smoke from votive lamps slowly blackened. Stand in that cloister and look up at the ropes' old anchor points.