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Diana Esther , Santa Maria Nuova: Ospedale dei Fiorentini: Architettura ed assistenza nella Firenze tra Settecento e Novecento (Florence : Edizioni Polistampa , 2012), pp. 629, [euro]90.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-88-596-1048-9.
Book Review
The hospital of Santa Maria Nuova is probably best known to English historians, and the readers of this journal, as providing the model for the plan and administration of the Savoy Hospital, which was established in London by King Henry VII in 1509 (K. Park and J. Henderson, "'The First Hospital among Christians": The Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova in Early Sixteenth-Century Florence', Medical History, 35 (1991), 35, 164-188). Though the London hospital was destroyed in the nineteenth century to make way for the Savoy Hotel, ironically the idea of the hotel was exported to Florence where it was opened in 1893 to house visitors from England and other countries. It is indeed mostly with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but also with the twentieth century, that this very substantial study of Santa Maria Nuova is concerned. Divided into five main chronological parts, the author has brought her detailed knowledge of both the archive and architecture of the site to provide the first in-depth account of the later development of this important European hospital.
Indeed one of the strengths of this study is that Santa Maria...