National Museum of San Matteo

This guide to the National Museum of San Matteo in Pisa traces the brick cloisters through two very different lives: eight centuries as a Benedictine convent founded in the ten-twenties, and then seventy-four years as Pisa's remand home for wayward youths after the state took it over in 1866. It follows the fire of 1607 that split the church nave and walled the nuns off behind a solid partition, and the postwar rebuilding by architect Piero Sanpaolesi that turned the same cells into galleries by 1949. You'll hear about the medieval double-arched windows and paired columns that survived both uses unchanged. Stand in the cloister and look up at the arcade that has watched over every version of this building.