Doing The Duomo

We spent our second day in Florence entirely in one square: Piazza del Duomo.

This is not hard to do. There's the actual cathedral (duomo), plus the bell tower and baptistery. By the time one climbs to the top of the first two, and then adds in lunch and some wine to gear up for the last, it's easily one full day.

View from our hotel:

Of course I'm dazzled by all the history and art and engineering behind these monuments. I did my due diligence, and before arriving in Italy knew a whole lot about the bricks and the mortar (literally) of how this dome was accomplished.

Ross King's book is sooooo good. It gives such a flavor of the politics, personalities, and cultural influences at play in 15th-cenutry Florence while the dome was under construction.

Brunelleschi's dome truly is an engineering marvel, and to this day, it's a total mystery how he accomplished it. Read this excerpt from a PBS special about the dome that aired last year:

The dome that crowns Florence’s great cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore—the Duomo—is a towering masterpiece of Renaissance ingenuity and an enduring source of mystery. Still the largest masonry dome on earth after more than six centuries, it is taller than the Statue of Liberty and weighs as much as an average cruise ship. Historians and engineers have long debated how its secretive architect, Filippo Brunelleschi, managed to keep the dome perfectly aligned and symmetrical as the sides rose and converged toward the center, 40 stories above the cathedral floor. His laborers toiled without safety nets, applying novel, untried methods. Over 4 million bricks might collapse at any moment—and we still don’t understand how Brunelleschi prevented it. To test the latest theories, a team of U.S. master bricklayers will help build a unique experimental model Duomo using period techniques. Will it stay intact during the final precarious stages of closing over the top of the dome?

Anyhoo, we're happy it stayed intact while we were up there.  What a view, inside and out, down and up.

Believe it or not, Brunelleschi won the right to design and construct the dome in a contest, after decades of everyone scratching their heads and looking at a topless cathedral.

Note on paintings in photo below: on the left = no perspective; on the right = perspective. They were learning so much in Renaissance Italy, now weren't they?

Did I mention we climbed 877 stairs total to get to top of dome and bell tower.  Apparently, by the looks of kid trip journals, it was rather noteworthy.

And apparently we need to work on our 7's!

Baptistery mosaic ceiling and Islamic-inpsired tile flooring (much different than Northern European Gothic churches):

And finally, the famous bronze doors of the baptistery. They were made by Brunelleschi's arch rival, Lorenzo Ghiberti.  He's the guy that co-won the dome contest, but was out-shined by Brunelleschi from the get-go. Nonetheless, he was star in his own right, as these doors make clear.

Till tomorrow, Flo'.