Digital Sepoltuario offers students, scholars, and the public an online resource for the study of commemorative culture in Florence from the thirteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Based on the city-wide sepoltuario compiled by the antiquarian Stefano Rosselli in the mid-seventeenth century, this site includes an illustrated catalogue of the city's memorials that recreates the commemorative landscape of the pre-modern city. Florence's extensive memorial culture was developed and propagated through thousands of decorated tombs personalized with inscriptions and coats of arms. These sepulchers were intended both to encourage prayers for the dead to ease their passage through Purgatory and to preserve and promote the family name for eternity. Groups who could sponsor altars and chapels ensured that masses and offices would further remediate their sin and aid their souls in their pursuit of heaven. Furnishings like holy water stoups, doorways, and altarpieces not only provided the clergy and faithful with what they needed for worship but also could be emblazoned with coats of arms and inscriptions as signs of their donors' piety and reminders to pray for their souls.

Numerous Florentine archives are home to unpublished tomb registries known in Italian as sepoltuari. These manuscripts written in Latin and Italian record the thousands of tomb monuments, chapels, altars, and other furnishings that were installed in Florence's churches between the mid-thirteenth and late eighteenth centuries. Sepoltuari are important sources of historical documentation for Renaissance memorial culture and family history, and they preserve descriptions of church interiors that have undergone renovations or no longer survive.

The important publication of Stefano di Francesco Rosselli: antiquario Fiorentino del XVII sec. e il suo sepoltuario by Michelina di Stasi (Edizioni Polistampa, 2014) made Rosselli's autograph sepoltuario in the private collection of Stefano's descendant Niccolò Rosselli del Turco available to the public through an accompanying DVD with a PDF reproduction of Rosselli's 1,624-page magnum opus.

Digital Sepoltuario seeks to answer many questions about how Florentines decided on their final resting places to understand what led them to their choices about tomb placement, form, and decoration. These memorial records are linked to records of the groups and individuals who were honored by these memorials through coats of arms and inscriptions as well as many more individuals who were buried in ancestral tombs, named only as generic descendants on the memorials covering their graves. Group and individual records contain information about social status, employment, and public service to bring greater context to the thousands of names recorded by Rosselli and other sepoltuari.

Digital Sepoltuario seeks to answer many questions about how Florentines decided on their final resting places. We want to understand what led them to their choices about tomb placement, form, and decoration. Canon law allowed Christians the right to choose their burial place if they were adults, able to make decisions, and acted in good faith, meaning that they did not deprive their parishes of their rightful burial income, for it was the parish church that was the expected final resting place for the faithful and burying their dead was a steady source of income. While many Florentines indeed found their final rest together with siblings, spouses, and children in ancestral parish tombs, and many more in common parochial graves, numerous individuals chose to build separate monuments in one of the city’s friaries, monasteries, convents, or the cathedral. When they did, they had to pay an extra fee to their home parish known as the quarta funeralis, totaling one-quarter of funeral costs in recompense for choosing an extra-parochial burial.

Digital Sepoltuario's relational database allows systematic analysis of Florence's tombs, altars, and other memorials, which visualized personal and corporate identities. The project advances new approaches to understanding the fabric of late medieval, Renaissance, and early modern urban life and the artistic patronage that shaped it. Beyond gathering in a single, public website visual and textual information regarding Florence's memorials and the architectural spaces that contained them, Digital Sepoltuario provides researchers with biographical, genealogical, political, and social data concerning the families and individuals responsible for commissioning chapels and tombs as well as the many additional men and women interred in these burial plots. Related material on the artists responsible for carving and installing stone monuments as well as painting family coats of arms, funeral banners, and commemorative altarpieces and frescoes, enriches our understanding of Florence's burial economy, ever present and continually producing.

Digital Sepoltuario has been made possible in part by a major grant from the Division of Preservation and Access of the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom. Additional funding has been generously provided by the Richard Lounsbery Foundation, the Kress Foundation, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the University of Virginia. Preliminary research by project historian and editor-in-chief Anne Leader was made possible through grants from The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti, the American Philosophical Society, the Renaissance Society of America, SCAD, and ArtStor. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this Web resource do not necessarily represent those of the NEH or other sources of funding.