Giotto's Campanile

Of all the marble-clad buildings around Florence's cathedral square, the slender bell tower is the most perfectly proportioned. Rising 84.7 metres on a square base less than fifteen metres across, Giotto's Campanile is covered from ground to parapet in white marble from Carrara, green marble from Prato and red marble from Siena, arranged in panels, bands and inlaid frames so that the whole shaft reads as one piece of coloured stonework. It stands free beside Santa Maria del Fiore, so that you can walk all the way around it and see every face.

The painter Giotto, appointed master of works of the cathedral, laid the first stone on 19 July 1334 but lived to see only the lowest storey. Andrea Pisano carried on his design from 1343 to 1348, and Francesco Talenti finished the upper storeys between 1348 and 1359. The change of hands is written into the tower. The heavy lower levels are almost solid, then the openings grow as the eye climbs: paired two-light windows in the middle storeys give way at the top to tall three-light windows under ornamental gables, which make the tower look lighter the higher it goes. The original plan crowned it with a spire; it was never built, and the flat balustraded terrace that replaced it is now part of the tower's character.

The lowest storey carries one of the most ambitious sculptural programmes of the Italian Middle Ages, a stone encyclopaedia of human life and knowledge. Hexagonal reliefs begin with the creation of Adam and Eve and the first labours, then show the inventors of herding, music and metalworking, and the arts of astronomy, building, medicine, weaving, law, navigation, agriculture, theatre and architecture; in the tier of lozenges above them appear the seven planets, the virtues and the liberal arts, and Luca della Robbia later added panels devoted to grammar, philosophy and music. Higher up, sixteen niches held statues of prophets, sibyls and patriarchs by Andrea and Nino Pisano and, from the 1420s, by Donatello among others — his Prophet Habakkuk is one of the finest. Every piece now on the tower is a copy; the originals are displayed at close range in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo.

The tower is also the best platform from which to understand Brunelleschi's dome. A stair of 414 steps, broad and broken by landings, climbs through the storeys, with terraces to step out on along the way; from the top the red dome fills the view at almost eye level, and the whole city spreads out around it to the hills. Seven bells hang inside, the largest, the Campanone cast in 1705, weighing over five tonnes. The campanile belongs to the Historic Centre of Florence World Heritage Site.

Getting there

The campanile stands in Piazza del Duomo in the heart of Florence, a pedestrian area reached on foot through the old centre. Florence Airport, Peretola (FLR), is about 6 km away.