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Cosimo I convinced Cellini to return to Florence to make his masterpiece, Perseus .

Botticelli’s beauty strikes a Classical, modest pose, covering her nakedness with her hands while an Hour rushes to clothe her and the west wind, Zephyr, blows her gracefully to shore in a swirl of pink roses (1485).

Medieval capital of the Mugello region, surrounded by Medici villas such as Cafaggiolo (see Villa di Cafaggiolo) and the Michelozzo-designed Castello del Trebbio (1461). In the town itself, painstakingly rebuilt after a 1919 earthquake, the 12th-century Pieve di San Lorenzo contains Renaissance altarpieces by Taddeo Gaddi and Bachiacca, apse murals by local Art Nouveau ceramics entrepreneur Galileo Chini (1906) and a damaged Madonna fresco by Giotto.

A Medici cousin commissioned the Birth of Venus and Primavera for his villa.

Renaissance master of languid figures populating grand mythological scenes. He got caught up in Florence’s spiritual crisis, and is said to have tossed his own “blasphemous” canvases upon Savonarola’s “Bonfires of the Vanities” (see Florence). He spent the rest of his career painting vapid Madonnas and uninspired religious scenes.

The tiny historic centre shelters a good Museo d’Arte Sacra, with Sienese School works by Duccio, Sano di Pietro and Matteo di Giovanni, who also left a Madonna and Child in the 14th-century Santi Piero e Paolo church.

San Romulado established this Benedictine community in 1012, though the monastery is 15th century and the Vasari-decorated church 16th. One mile (1.5km) up a forest path lies the secluded hermitage (only men admitted), a tiny village of monkish cottages alongside a Baroque church.

Roman Baroque master whose life came to an untimely close in Tuscany.

Carrara is a quarry town, its snowy white marble the source of grandiose sculpture from ancient Rome to Michelangelo to Henry Moore. The town’s Duomo is pure Carrara marble, and marble-cutting shops and sculptors’ studios fill the streets. On the main square, look for the plaque and relief of stone-carving tools that mark the house where Michelangelo once stayed. The Museo del Marmo features the ancient Roman altar Edicola di Fantiscritti.

The house in which the saint was born was made a sanctuary in 1466, with a modest Baroque church containing the 12th-century Pisan Crucifixion that gave Catherine the stigmata, a brick loggia (constructed in 1533 by Baldassare Peruzzi) and a small oratory with Baroque paintings by Il Riccio, Francesco Vanni and Il Pomarancio. Follow the staircase down past Catherine’s cell to see if the Oratorio dell’Oca and its frescoes of angels are open.