Florence Pictures | Piazzas and Squares | piazza-santissima-annunziata | Ospedale degli Innocenti
Detail of the Ospedale degli Innocenti, Florence's historical orphananage and today home to UNICEF's research offices and a small museum. Ceramic tondos by Andrea della Robbia of a baby in swaddling clothes on a blue wheel represent the horizontal wheel in the wall where babies could be rotated into the interior and parents not be seen. A few of the tondi are still the original ones (from around 1490) but some are nineteenth century copies.
