Marin Luther himself had written … “They are built with gift buildings, excellent foods and drinks are within everyone’s reach, the servants are very diligent, the doctors, the beds and the clothes are very clean, and the painted beds. As soon as a Sick is stripped of all the clothes […] a white shirt is put on him, he puts him in a nice painted bed, pure silk sheets. Immediately afterwards two doctors are conducted […] ; you need the poor and then they return home […].
I saw it in Florence with how much care the hospitals are kept. Thus also the houses of the exhibited children, where the children are housed, fed and educated in an excellent way; Everyone with the same dress of the same color and are cured very paternally “. In the courtyard of the Hospital of S.Maria Nuova or better in the cloister of the bones (in memory of the cemetery area), entering the temple in memory of the benefactor count Angolo Orlando Galli Tassi, we enter a corridor with stairs that lead at the bottom and exceeded A small door we walk a gallery below the courtyard and roadway.
This is the ancient corridor that united the convent of the Oblate to the Hospital of S.Maria Nuova, here the volunteers-infirmers crossed the tunnel without being seen, maybe they stopped for a moment to pray since there is a small supported altar inside by columns and a Madonna and Child in terracotta. Beyond a passage for the hospital, the corridor arrived inside the church of S.Egidio and through grates could attend religious functions. And since at the time there was no electric light, in the longest part there are several air “sockets”, indispensable for visibility and clearly for the air itself.
On the right of the church of S.Egidio under the loggia we can Seeing a small door with grates, this is another entrance for the basement, if one overlooks the stairs that go down. Towards the end of the corridor on the side of the oblate currently closed by a wall (there are projects to be able to return this corridor to the ancient splendor), there is a large room where there are three large stone tanks inside each one carved in a block It is unique, but it is not known for sure that function had, perhaps oil tanks or for the processing of wool.
Someone recalls Leonardo’s experiments, who in the hospital sectioned about thirty corpses from 1489 onwards, hypothesis to be discarded since the room is not equipped with windows, therefore there would be no hygienic conditions to avoid the accumulation of bacteria e Mephitic gases. The unloading for organic liquids, which would simply have simply gathered on the floor is also missing. We hope that in the future the corridor will be reopened, it would be another piece for the oldest hospital in the world.
