While visiting Florence (Italy) for an exhibition of Hellenistic Bronze I spent a day wondering around the city and ran into the Ospedale degli Innocenti. I had heard of the Hospital of the Innocents and assumed that it was a museum – which was only partly true.
(The entire facility is under going a major renovation.)
Ospedale degli Innocenti was built between 1419 and 1445, and commenced operation in 1445. Its operation was described in the museum:
“Foundlings were taken in at the Innocenti, as indeed they were everywhere else in medieval Tuscany, via a stone column, akin to a holy water stoup, set outside the loggia on the facade, where they were left.
In the course of the 16th century they began to be taken in through a window that communicated with the women’s church, covered by a grate large enough only for newborn babies to be passed through.
On the other side of the wall was a small “hut” which became synonymous with the place where the children were abandoned and has been called a “crib” ever since.
In 1660 the grated window or crib, popularly called the “wheel”, was moved to the loggia’s northernmost end, towards what is now Via della Colonna. The wheel remained in use until 1875, when it was walled up. It is possible today to see how the tiny grate only allowed very small children to be passed through it. There was a bell which a person leaving a baby could ring to alert the wet-nurses on duty inside.”
The Ospedale operated as an orphanage for nearly 600 years, and the number of children it served is indicated by its archives:
(Compare this with the Long Room of the Old Library, Trinity College, Dublin where the Book of Kells is kept:)
Though I am not sure that it is still an active orphanage in the original sense, the Ospedale is still very much an operational children’s facility:
Here is an interior courtyard and the building decoration that has become the icon of the Ospedale (you can see a faint outline of it in the above sign).
Western Marches 