The hard evidence can be found in the city’s state archives, just past the gate of Santa Croce. Open to the public (though in-person registration is required), these archives contain documents dating back to the eighth century. During a research visit, I reviewed a massive, leather-wrapped ledger, now over 500 years old, where I found the names of thousands of men, all accused of sodomy during the city’s Renaissance heyday. One of them was Leonardo da Vinci, who was accused in 1476 of engaging the services of a male sex worker at the age of 26. And he wasn’t the only celebrated artist whose name is in such a ledger: Sandro Botticelli faced his own accusations; sculptor Benvenuto Cellini was convicted twice for sodomy.
It’s well-documented that 15th-century Florence was a European locus of queer sex and culture. Surviving records describe a city where, as historian Michael Rocke writes in Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence, men had sex in “nearly all of the thirty to forty taverns and inns and in the several public baths spread throughout the city” as well as in “alleys, streets, or fields around taverns.” A thriving sex trade among men soliciting men centered in the Baldracca, the city’s proto-red light district. Even the Duomo itself was a frequent site for hookups. On the balconies and passageways leading up to the cathedral’s dome, men were often found “kissing each other and giving each other the tongue”—so much so that public access to the cupola was eventually banned.
Today, there’s little trace of this gay history. While Brunelleschi’s famed dome is once again open to the public, that seedy Baldracca neighborhood was razed in the mid-16th century to build the Uffizi, now visited by over 5 million art-seekers a year. In the museum’s collection are famous works like Da Vinci’s Adoration of the Magi; Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, and a muscular, barely-clothed St. Sebastian, that early adopted gay icon, by the painter Giovanni Antonio Bazzi—better known as Il Sodoma (yes, for the reasons you might imagine). Rarely, however, do the many guides in the museum mention Leonardo or Botticelli’s sodomy accusations, or that Michelangelo, the creator of David himself, had written thirty love poems dedicated to a young nobleman. (“This, lord, has happened to me since I saw you: a bitter sweetness, a yes-and-no feeling moves me,” he wrote. “Certainly it must have been your eyes.”) The true, queer history of Florence is often forgotten, relegated to footnotes.