The focus of the western city centre is the large, pleasant Piazza Santa Maria Novella in front of the church it was titled after, which has a lethargic backwater atmosphere, favoured as a spot for picnic lunches and after-dark loitering. From the beguiling green, white and pink patterns of its marble facade, you’d never guess that the church of Santa Maria Novella was the Florentine base of the Dominican order, fearsome vigilantes of thirteenth-century Catholicism. The architects of the Gothic interior (Mon-Fri 7am-noon & 3.30-6pm, Sat 7am-noon & 3.30-5pm, Sun 3.30-5pm) were capable of great ingenuity - the distance between the columns diminishes with closeness to the altar, a device to make the nave appear from the entrance to be longer than it is. Masaccio’ s extraordinary 1427 fresco of The Trinity , one of the early works in which appearance and classical proportion were rigorously employed, is painted onto the surround halfway down the left aisle. Filippino Lippi ’s frescoes for the Cappella di Filippo Strozzi (immediately to the right of the chancel) are a fantasy vision of classical ruins in which the narrative often seems to take second place, and one of the first examples of an archeological interest in Roman culture. As a chronicle of fifteenth-century life in Florence, no series of frescoes is more fascinating than Domenico Ghirlandaio ’s behind the high altar; the work was commissioned by Giovanni Tornabuoni - which explains why certain ladies of the Tornabuoni family are present at the birth of John the Baptist and of the Virgin. Brunelleschi ’s Crucifix , popularly supposed to have been carved as a response to Donatello’s uncouth version at Santa Croce, hangs in the Cappella Gondi, left of the chancel. At the end of the left transept is the raised Cappella Strozzi , whose colourless frescoes by Nardo di Cione (1350s) include an entire surround of visual commentary on Dante’s Inferno . The magnificent altarpiece by Nardo’s brother Andrea (better known as Orcagna ), is a piece of propaganda for the Dominicans - Christ is shown bestowing favour simultaneously on both St Peter and St Thomas Aquinas, a figure second only to St Dominic in the order’s hierarchy.