Florence, Italy
Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore · DWOH-moh; SAN-ta ma-REE-a del FYOH-reh
A cathedral planned with a dome 45 metres wide at a time when no one alive knew how to build one. For years the walls stood open to the sky. A goldsmith closed them, in sixteen years, without scaffolding from the ground. No larger dome of brick has been built since.
Photo: Dllu, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
You are in a square too small for what stands in it. A wall of white, green and pink marble rises in front of you like a cliff. To see the top you have to tip your head back, and then you see only the edge of something red and very large, curving away.
The dome was begun in 1420. In the same year, in Beijing, the Forbidden City was finished, and the fleets of Zheng He were sailing the Indian Ocean for the Ming (1368–1644) emperor.
The cathedral is free. Everything else is sold in three passes, each valid for three days, and each covering the ones below it.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The cathedral | Free; no booking |
| The dome | Brunelleschi Pass, 30 euros, at a booked time |
| The bell tower | Giotto Pass, 20 euros |
| The Baptistery | Ghiberti Pass, 15 euros; ceiling hidden for repair |
| The museum | Ghiberti Pass, 15 euros |
| Santa Reparata, the older church below | Ghiberti Pass, 15 euros |
Florence in 1296 was rich from wool and banking, and wanted the largest church in the world. The plan called for a dome wider than any built since ancient Rome. The city began anyway, and trusted that someone would work out the roof later.
By 1418 the walls were up and the hole was open to the rain. The usual way to build an arch was over a wooden frame. There was not enough timber in Tuscany for a frame that size.
Filippo Brunelleschi, a goldsmith and clockmaker, said he could do it with no frame at all. He built two domes, one inside the other, laid the bricks in a zigzag so that each ring held itself up, and invented the cranes to lift them. It took sixteen years.
You can climb between his two domes to the top.
"Duomo means dome." It is the Italian word for a cathedral, from the Latin for house: the house of God.
"The marble front is medieval." The front was bare brick until 1887. What you see was built in the reign of Queen Victoria.
"You need a ticket for the cathedral." The church itself is free. The tickets are for the dome, the tower, the Baptistery and the museum.
"The inside must be as rich as the outside." It is nearly bare. Florence spent its money on the shell, and most of the art once inside is now in the museum behind.
"Giotto built the bell tower." He designed it at sixty-seven and lived to see only the first storey.
The stops begin at the oldest building in the square and end on top of the newest part of the cathedral.
The eight-sided building in front of the cathedral is two hundred years older than it. For centuries every child born in Florence was baptised here.
Its ceiling is covered with gold mosaic of the 1200s. In 2026 the ceiling is being restored and is hidden by a platform; the cathedral works say so on their ticket site.
In 1401 the cloth merchants of Florence held a contest for a pair of bronze doors. Seven artists entered. The winner was Lorenzo Ghiberti, aged twenty-three. The loser who took it hardest was Brunelleschi, who gave up sculpture and went to Rome to measure ruins.
Ghiberti spent twenty-one years on those doors and then twenty-seven on a second pair, the ones facing the cathedral. They have ten square panels of scenes from the Old Testament, in gilded bronze, with buildings that seem to go back into real space.
Michelangelo said they were fit to be the gates of Paradise, and the name stayed. The doors in front of you are copies. The real ones are in the museum, in a case filled with nitrogen.
The first front was started in 1296 and got a third of the way up. In 1587 the Medici duke had it pulled off, meaning to build something modern. Nothing was agreed for three hundred years.
The present front was finished in 1887. The white marble is from Carrara, the green from Prato and the pink from the Maremma: the colours of the Italian flag, which was then twenty-six years old.
The tower is 84.7 metres high and stands apart from the church, as bell towers do in Italy. Giotto, the painter, was made city architect in 1334 and drew it. He died three years later with one storey built.
Look at the lowest row of small carved panels. They show the trades that made Florence: weaving, building, medicine, navigation, law. One shows a man falling off a ladder into flight. He is Daedalus, the first inventor.
There are 414 steps and no lift. The reward is the only close view of the dome from outside.
Inside, turn round and look above the door. The clock was painted in 1443. It has one hand and twenty-four hours, and it runs backwards, as a shadow moves on a sundial. The day ends at XXIV, which is sunset.
On the left wall is a painting of 1465. Dante stands outside the walls of Florence holding his poem, with hell on one side, the mountain of purgatory behind, and the dome, then twenty-nine years old, on the other.
On Sunday 26 April 1478, during Mass, men of the Pazzi family attacked the two Medici brothers near the altar. Giuliano was stabbed nineteen times and died on the floor. Lorenzo, cut in the neck, got into the sacristy and bolted its bronze door. By evening the plotters were hanging from the windows of the town hall.
Stand under the centre and look up. The painting covers 3,600 square metres and shows the Last Judgment in rings: heaven at the top, hell at the bottom. It was done between 1572 and 1579.
Brunelleschi wanted the inside left plain, or covered in gold mosaic like the Baptistery. Many Florentines have thought since that he was right.
The dome has eight sides and not a round base, which made it harder: a round dome holds itself together as it rises, and an eight-sided one tries to fall inward at the flat parts.
The climb is 463 steps. After the first stair you come out on a narrow gallery inside the dome, close under the painted devils. Then you enter the space between the two shells. The inner one is two metres thick and carries the weight. The outer one keeps the rain off and makes the dome look taller.
Look at the bricks beside you. In every course some are set upright, and the upright ones climb in a spiral, like the pattern of a herringbone cloth. They lock each new ring to the one below before the mortar is dry. That is how the masons could work with nothing under them.
More than four million bricks went into it. Brunelleschi had a canteen set up on the scaffolding so that the men did not lose time climbing down for lunch, and had their wine watered.
You come out at the foot of the marble lantern, 90 metres up. Brunelleschi designed it but died in 1446, when work on it had only just begun. The gilded ball above went up in 1471. Lightning knocked it off in 1601; a white disc in the paving behind the cathedral marks where it landed.
The museum is behind the cathedral, on the spot where Michelangelo carved David. It has the real golden doors, a wall rebuilt to show the lost first front with its statues, and Brunelleschi's wooden models.
It also has a group of four figures that Michelangelo carved in his seventies for his own tomb. The old man at the top, holding up the dead Christ, has the sculptor's face. He broke the group with a hammer and gave it away.
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| 1296 | The cathedral is begun | Yuan China (1271–1368); Marco Polo has been home in Venice for a year |
| 1334 | Giotto designs the bell tower | Yuan China; fourteen years before the Black Death kills half of Florence |
| 1420 | Brunelleschi starts the dome | Ming China (1368–1644): the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven are finished |
| 1436 | The dome is closed and the church consecrated | Ming China; in Germany Gutenberg is at work on printing with movable type |
| 1452 | The golden doors are hung | Leonardo da Vinci is born; a year before Constantinople falls to the Ottomans |
| 1478 | Murder at Mass | Ming China, the Chenghua reign; Botticelli is painting Spring in the same city |
| 1579 | The painting inside the dome is finished | Ming China: Li Shizhen has just completed his great book of medicines; Drake is sailing round the world |
| 1887 | The marble front is finished | Qing China, the Guangxu reign; in Paris work begins on the Eiffel Tower |
Films from official channels, played from YouTube. Nothing is loaded until you press play.
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
The judges asked Brunelleschi to show his plan. He refused, in case it was stolen, and asked instead that whoever could make an egg stand on end on a slab of marble should build the dome. The others tried and failed. He tapped the egg on the marble, flattening its end, and it stood. They said they could have done that. "So you could have built the dome," he said, "if you had seen my plan."
Source: Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists (1550)
One of the rival builders proposed to fill the church with earth to hold the dome up while it was built, and to mix small coins into the earth, so that the people of Florence would carry it all away afterwards for nothing.
Source: Vasari, Lives of the Artists; the same tale is told of the Pantheon
High on the north side of the cathedral a stone bull's head looks down at a house across the street. A master mason was the lover of a baker's wife who lived there. When her husband had them taken to court, the mason set the horned head where the husband would see it every morning.
Source: Florentine popular tradition
On Easter morning a cart loaded with fireworks is drawn to the cathedral door by white oxen. A rocket shaped like a dove runs down a wire from the altar and sets it alight. If the dove flies back to the altar without stopping, the harvest will be good.
Source: Florentine custom, kept since at least the fifteenth century
Later, people who live here will be able to add the stories they grew up with, and say which of these they have heard.
Last checked 2026-11-12. The cathedral works' own ticket site (tickets.duomo.firenze.it), prices and opening hours as shown in November 2026.
Checked 2026-11-12
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