The organ of the Badia Fiorentina, Florence’s tenth-century Abbey Church, stands as a rare and precious moment in the developmental history of the modern European organ.The instrument was built by Onofrio Zefferini da Cortona, completed in 1558, and by good fortune survived the re-ordering of the Abbey church, the Napoleonic stripping of Florence’s art and wealth, changes in taste and the ‘modernisation’ common in the eighteenth and nineteeth centuries. Now after careful research and light restoration, the organ speaks with the same clarity and character with which it did when first completed.
