The Digital Sepoltuario database is organized around the central element of a manuscript sepoltuario, what we call memorials. While most of our memorials are tombs (stone markers decorated with coats of arms, inscriptions, and/or sculpture), sepoltuari also include chapels and altars and other furnishings donated to churches by individuals who identified their gifts with the same signs used to mark tombs and chapels, namely sculpted or painted heraldry and carved or inlaid lettering. Memorials in the database are linked to family, religious, and civic groups as well as to the individuals who belonged to one or more of these groups.

Memorials are also linked topographically to the building complexes that contained them through discrete spaces within these buildings. Information is linked to relevant sources to allow users to create a bibliography or pursue further research. Read on to learn more about the Memorials, Buildings, Groups, Individuals, Locations, Sources, and Spaces that you can search and explore in Digital Sepoltuario.

Note that research, analysis, and data entry is ongoing. Given the large scope of the project, we prefer to make what we have available to users while we continue to build and refine the dataset. If you do not find what you are looking for, or if the records you find seem incomplete or in error, please contact us so we can let you know if a record is forthcoming or can make needed adjustments to existing records. We are always happy to bump groups, individuals, or memorials up in the production sequence if they are relevant to your research. Contact Us!

Objects in religious spaces that remember groups and/or individuals with inscriptions, heraldry, and/or portraiture. While primarily tombs, chapels, and altars, memorial types include all variant objects found in Stefano Rosselli's 1657 Sepoltuario Fiorentino. These objects tend to be fixed in place while moveable gifts like chalices, reliquaries, and vestments, which also could carry coats of arms and inscriptions, are for the most part absent from this dataset because they were typically recorded in church or sacristy inventories and not in sepoltuari. Search Memorials Go >

Memorial-holding institutions. Comprehensive sepoltuari like those by Francesco della Foresta and Stefano Rosselli are organized by institution, usually a church, religious house, or hospital. Building records provide brief historical sketches of each memorial-holding institution described in the Rosselli copy kept at the Archivio di Stato di Firenze, which includes an addendum of memorials to Florentine citizens found in churches outside the city in Fiesole, Padua, Rome, Siena, and the Tuscan countryside. Buildings are connected to the memorials found on their premises and their corresponding groups and individuals through Spaces, described below. Search Buildings Go >

Organizations or collections of individuals based on familial, neighborhood, political, professional, or religious ties. Group records include verbal and visual descriptions of any heraldic symbols used by the group.

Most of the groups in Digital Sepoltuario are families, whose records contain information about social status as determined by antiquity, political service, size, and wealth. Family records track inclusion in or omission from lists compiled by a variety of entities. The Florentine government in the late thirteenth century identified magnates among the old elite to ban them from serving in one of Florence's three main magistracies: the signoria made up of Priors and a Standard-bearer of Justice and two advisory councils known as the Twelve Buonuomini and the Sixteen Gonfalonieri di Compagnia.1 Antiquarians noted all families that entered the signoria including first year of participation and total number of priorates held.2 Appearance in the works of contemporary authors like Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) and Giovanni Villani (ca. 1275-1348), as well as the text attributed to Ricordano Malispini (act. 1280s) but written in the later fourteenth century,3 allowed later generations of named families to claim both antiquity and importance in Florentine history. The poet Ugolino Verino (1438-1516) praised the families seen in his day as noble in his De Illustratione Urbis Florentiae, and families included in his list, as well as the addendum by Carlo Strozzi in 1636, are also tracked.4 Historians R. Burr Litchfield (1986), Anthony Molho (1994), and John Padgett (2010) compiled lists as part of their analyses of the ruling elite in the Republican (Molho and Padgett) and Ducal periods (Litchfield), and each family's inclusion or exclusion is noted.5

Religious groups can also be categorized and organized according to criteria beyond name and heraldry. They are tracked in terms of the gender of its members and whether they formed a confraternity, hospital staff, or were members of the secular or regular clergy, which can be further refined based on the group's affiliation and activity. Search Groups Go >

People connected to a memorial as an honoree, burial, owner, commissioner, or artist. While our primary consideration for including an individual in Digital Sepoltuario is a memorial connection, there are additional criteria for inclusion: Given that tombs can be used over many generations, individuals who can connect ancestors to descendants are also included in the dataset. It is for this reason that we provide up to four patronyms where possible and can connect as many as nine generations through a single person. Men with extensive records of political service are sometimes included, even if their burial site is presently unknown. If an individual you think should be included in our dataset is missing, please contact us. Because wealth and political service contributed to the social status of a family, wherever possible, we list individuals' employment, government offices, and political appointments. Search Individuals Go >

The physical places where the events documented in Digital Sepoltuario happened, corresponding to two-dimensional points and shapes on a map. Users can search by country or city, and within Italy also by region. Within the city of Florence, users can search by the ecclesiastical divisions of the city (the parish) as well as its administrative divisions: the sesto or sestiere in effect from 1173 to August 10, 1343, or the quartiere in effect from either before 1173 or after August 11, 1343. These sixth and quarter systems were further divided into administrative districts known as gonfaloni after the heraldic banner (gonfalone) under which militias from each section of the city marched in times of war and celebration. While we try to locate individuals, groups, and buildings at the street level, available information sometimes only allows us to specify the parish, gonfalone, quarter, or sesto. Where none of these subdivisions are known, Florence serves as the location, the only city in the dataset to incorporate subdivisions. Wherever possible, locations are sourced from the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names Online (TGN). Search Locations Go >

Any archival or published work from which data has been taken. For ease of reading on record pages, a short form of the source name is provided. Full bibliographic information can be found on the linked Source Record itself. Search Sources Go >

Three-dimensional built environments that contain memorials, which are based on the buildings and their subdivisions as described in the sepoltuari. Numerated lists of memorials are arranged topographically, but no one ordering system applies across sepoltuari. For the purposes of our information architecture we have thus created the generalized concept of a “space” — a simple spatial volume that can be part of a larger space and contain sub-spaces. For each memorial we create a record for the smallest space that surrounds the memorial for which we have solid documentation of its position and extent. That space record is linked to its parent space and additional lineage to connect it to the whole. Spaces can represent the volumes for free-standing complexes, individual buildings, or internal rooms or other building divisions. Complexes, like monasteries or friaries, are made up of two or more buildings. Thus, the space record for a complex will have two or more sub-spaces corresponding to those buildings. A building is any standalone structure like a church, cemetery, cloister, or piazza. The space record for a building can have sub-spaces corresponding to building divisions including enclosed rooms like a sacristy or chapter room or distinct parts within a building like an aisle, transept, or loggia. Search Spaces Go >