In 1650, Stefano di Francesco Rosselli (1598–1664) began a seven-year project to record all of the "churches, chapels, and tombs, their coats of arms and inscriptions, in the city of Florence and its environs" in a single manuscript. He described his work as an effort to preserve memorials that were already disappearing in his own time. Digital Sepoltuario has been inspired by Rosselli's "Sepoltuario Fiorentino," aiming to make its contents widely accessible and enriched through links to biographical and other historical data. Rosselli's autograph manuscript survives and remains in the private library of one of his descendants, Marchese Niccolò Rosselli del Turco. Though never published, the manuscript was quickly recognized as an invaluable source for the study of family history and for preserving through written description many tombs, altars, and other memorials, and even entire churches, that had been lost to urban development, fire, war, renovation, greed, or negligence. Rosselli was especially critical of friars and descendants who sold family tombs to new patrons. While many of the monuments Rosselli describes remain in their original locations, others have since disappeared for the same reasons.
Consulting the autograph manuscript allows readers to see Rosselli's exquisite pen-and-ink drawings of the coats of arms found on Florentine memorials, with which he shows the variety of forms the heraldic shield took over the centuries, a feature not present in the copies, which use a regularized shield shaped like a clothes iron (a heater shield). Moreover, study of the original reveals that copyists often introduced errors of transcription or omission in their versions of Rosselli's text. Such mistakes are understandable given that the sepoltuario itself consists of 1,646 hand-written pages numbered 1 through 1,623, with several page numbers repeated and the final page left unnumbered (see di Stasi, p. 59). Rosselli included a ten-page "Introduction to whoever reads" (Introduzione a chi legge), an interesting choice of words that points to Rosselli's admitted uncertainty that his text would ever be read beyond his own study. He also penned a seventy-nine-page index of family names and a one-page description of the boundaries of the city's four quarters, which he used to organize his descriptions of 128 Florentine and Fiesolan churches.
Indeed, Rosselli's 1,726 pages, written with a hand that can be difficult to read, presented quite a daunting challenge to transcribers. Yet they did so, often adding commentary, corrections, explanations, and, in the case of the two-volume copy kept at the Archivio di Stato di Firenze, an additional section of churches in Rome, Siena, Padova, Pisa, the Mugello, and elsewhere that contained Florentine tombs. This same copyist, likely Giovan Battista Dei (1702–89), added a new index of churches in order of their appearance, and most likely the title page and printed portrait of Stefano Rosselli as new front matter before the 1,726 autograph pages by Rosselli. In 1785, Stefano's descendant Vittorio Rosselli già del Turco (1745–1804) copied several older documents, inserted as the last few pages of the manuscript (see di Stasi, p. 58).
View the autograph manuscript here
We remain grateful to Marchese Niccolò Rosselli del Turco for allowing us to publish photographs of his manuscript and request that you cite it as follows:
Rosselli, Stefano di Francesco. "Sepoltuario Fiorentino ovvero Descrizione delle Chiese Cappelle e Sepolture, loro Armi & Inscrizioni della Città di Firenze e suoi Contorni fatta da me Stefano Rosselli MDCLVII." Rosselli del Turco Collection, Borgo SS. Apostoli, Florence, inv. no. 201 (già ms. 262). Digital edition via Digital Sepoltuario: Memorial Culture in Renaissance Florence, edited by Anne Leader. Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (2026, https://sepoltuario.iath.virginia.edu/book, accessed: MM/DD/YYYY).
For short form notes use:
Stefano Rosselli, "Sepoltuario Fiorentino," Rosselli del Turco Collection, 201 via https://sepoltuario.iath.virginia.edu/book, accessed MM/DD/YYYY.
