The city of Florence, Italy, is the unmistakable home of the great painter, architect, and sculptor, Michelangelo Buonarroti, known today simply as Michelangelo. The second of five sons to Ludovico di Buonaorotto Simoni, he was born in 1475 in the nearby village of Caprese but always considered himself a "son of Florence." Today, one needs not look long or hard to witness Michelangelo's influence on the city. His tomb is displayed prominently alongside those of Machiavelli, Galileo, and Rossini, and many of his most famous works of sculpture are housed throughout Florence - including, the magnificent statue of David.
Michelangelo was actually born outside the city boundaries, and he spent many of his youngest years with a wet nurse in a family of stonecutters. His childhood among this hard-working stonecutter family was lacking in affection. Michelangelo essentially grew up without a maternal influence, for his mother was too sick to nurse him and died when he was only six. His stepmother did provide for him but was generally too occupied with running the household to exert a tender influence on the young boy. Still, Michelangelo found his own inspiration in the skilled craftsmanship of the stonecutters. It was in the stone quarries of his youth that Michelangelo began his life-long loving relationship with stone - marble in particular. Michelangelo shared that love for stone with all of Tuscany: Irving Stone, author of the famous biography of Michelangelo, The Agony and the Ecstasy, has written that "the Tuscan treats stone with the tenderness that a lover reserves for his sweetheart," and Tuscans affectionately refer to their native marble as pieta serena, or "serene stone."
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