ABSTRACT
In February 1993 UNICEF hosted 34 experts from 20 countries at the Spedale degli Innocenti in Florence to take part in the fourth Global Seminar of the International Child Development Centre (ICDC) usually referred to as the “Innocenti Centre”.1 The building was designed by Brunelleschi, constructed between 1419 and 1424 in order to care for the orphaned and abandoned children of the city state. It is extraordinarily beautiful. Above the loggia runs a series of medallions by Della Robbia, each depicting a baby, described by E.M. Forster in A Room with a View as “those divine babies whom no cheap reproduction can ever stale … with their shining limbs bursting from the garments of charity, and their strong white arms extended against circlets of heaven” (Forster, 1978: 39). Patricia Light, formerly the Information Officer at ICDC, who used to pass through the archways of the loggia every day on her way to work, believes that these babies gave Eglantyne Jebb the idea for the emblem of the first five-point Declaration on the Rights of the Child and the original logo of agencies in the Save the Children Alliance. The experts who met in February 1993 may have paid these divine babies only a passing glance. Their discussions concerned children with a different kind of visibility, who have also come to be a kind of modern icon – street children.
