Museo del Bargello

Crowds clamour to see David, but few rush to Michelangelo’s early works in the Bargello. The artist was just 22 when a cardinal commissioned him to create the drunken Bacchus displayed in the ground-floor hall. His large roundel of the Madonna and Child with the infant St John, known as Tondo Pitti, portrays the halo-bare pair in a very human light. However, the collection’s most illustrious member is another David. Donatello’s bronze version from the 1440s, the first freestanding nude to be sculpted since classical times, is elegant and slenderly androgynous – a curious contrast from Michelangelo’s he-man version. These are just a few highlights of an extraordinary collection that includes works by Bandinelli, Cellini, Danti, Giambologna and Verrocchio, as well as a large group of terracotta pieces by the prolific della Robbia family. And don’t neglect the Palazzo del Bargello itself, which served as the republic’s high court for three centuries, and then as a Medici prison. Built in the 1250s, it’s a smaller and purer version of Italian Gothic than the oft-renovated Palazzo Vecchio.