Florence Cathedral

Santa Maria del Fiore took 140 years to build, and its defining feature was an engineering problem nobody could solve when construction began. Florence approved Arnolfo di Cambio's design in 1294 and laid the first stone on 9 September 1296; the nave was finished by 1380, but the octagonal crossing, 44 metres wide and starting 52 metres above the floor, stood open to the sky for decades. Tuscany did not have enough timber to build the wooden centring a conventional vault would need, and Florentine taste had already rejected the flying buttresses used by Gothic builders to the north.

Filippo Brunelleschi, a goldsmith by training, won the 1418 competition and built the dome between 1420 and 1436 without any supporting frame. His answer was two brick shells, one inside the other, held together by rings of sandstone beams acting like barrel hoops, with the bricks laid in a herringbone pattern so each fresh course leaned on the ribs rather than falling inward. Some 37,000 tonnes of material, including more than four million bricks, went up on hoisting machines he invented; a young Leonardo da Vinci, apprenticed to Verrocchio when the gilt ball was lifted onto the lantern in 1469, sketched them. The finished dome and lantern reach 114.5 metres, and it remains the largest masonry dome ever built. The space between the shells, where the internal rings can still be seen, is the route of the climb to the top.

The green, white and pink marble skin that makes the building so recognisable is partly younger than it looks: the medieval façade was pulled down in 1587 and left bare until Emilio De Fabris's Gothic Revival front went up between 1876 and 1887. Inside, the mood changes to sober stone and vast volume. Look up into the dome at Giorgio Vasari and Federico Zuccari's Last Judgment, painted between 1572 and 1579 across some 3,600 square metres. Over the main door is Paolo Uccello's one-handed clock of 1443, still running on the old Italian time that counted 24 hours from sunset, and two painted equestrian monuments honour the mercenary captains Niccolò da Tolentino and Sir John Hawkwood, the latter by Uccello in green tones that imitate bronze. Domenico di Michelino's 1465 panel shows Dante holding the Divine Comedy outside the city walls, with the cathedral already crowned by its dome.

Below the nave, excavations between 1965 and 1974 uncovered Roman houses and the remains of Santa Reparata, the older cathedral this one replaced; part of that crypt is open, and near its entrance lies Brunelleschi's own plain tomb. The cathedral forms a single ensemble with Giotto's Campanile and the Baptistery on Piazza del Duomo, inside the UNESCO-listed historic centre of Florence.

Getting there

The cathedral stands in the heart of Florence, within walking distance of the whole historic centre. Florence Airport, Peretola (FLR) is about 6 km away.