Basilica of Santa Maria Novella

The facade of Santa Maria Novella is a Renaissance geometry lesson in green and white marble, designed by Leon Battista Alberti in the 1450s and so mathematically precise that art historians have spent centuries measuring its proportional ratios. It was the first major church facade to apply classical architectural principles to a Gothic structure, and its elegant scrolls connecting the upper and lower stories became one of the most copied design elements in European architecture.

Inside is darker, stranger, and more interesting. Masaccio's Holy Trinity fresco, painted around 1427, was the first artwork to use precise one-point linear perspective — stand at the right spot and the painted barrel vault recedes into the wall so convincingly that Vasari wrote it looked like "a hole in the wall." This single fresco essentially invented the visual language of Western painting.

The Spanish Chapel, originally the chapter house, has frescoes by Andrea di Bonaiuto from the 1360s that are so densely packed with theological symbolism that scholars are still decoding them. Ghirlandaio's frescoes in the Tornabuoni Chapel document everyday Florentine life in the 1480s with photographic precision — the clothing, the hairstyles, the architecture — while ostensibly depicting the lives of the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist.

Giovanni Boccaccio set the opening of The Decameron in this church — it's where his fictional characters gather to flee Florence during the Black Death of 1348. The church also sits right next to the train station named after it, making it the first Renaissance masterpiece most visitors see arriving in Florence, whether they realize it or not.