This first section is a brief explanation of my Italy blog posts, which were inspired by my 2-week trip to Italy in May, 2025. Feel free to skip this section if you’ve read it before.
Dear Reader, If you read my Italy posts in the order in which they’ve come out, it may seem as though we hopped back and forth all over the country, but I have decided not to write these posts sequentially. I want to write about the things that interest me most, as the spirit moves me. For some topics, I may even combine cities. I hope that by doing so, you’ll find it a lot more interesting than if I just give you a tedious day by day description of our itinerary, as if I were your Aunt Mabel forcing you to sit down and watch all her Super 8 films of the family road trip to Niagara Falls from 1966.
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions about how I’m approaching this travelogue-within-a-blog, please let me know in the comments below!
If you are familiar with Florence, Italy, Dear Reader, then you are most likely conjuring up an image of its iconic dome in your mind as you read this. Yup, that’s the cathedral in question. I’ve already written a blog post about that cathedral’s interior, along with the crypt beneath it and the ruins of the original, much smaller church that once stood on ton that same spot. Check it out if you haven’t already.
I have to brag that this, I kid you not, was the view from the window of our AirBnB. Oh, and the place used to be a palace. Now it’s broken up into a multi-story apartment building/vacation rental type place with unreliable air conditioning. But still, it was fun to imagine sleeping in a palace with a view of an iconic cathedral.
I’ve decided that I’m not going to attempt to tackle how the dome itself was built, or its history. Suffice it to say that it is the largest masonry dome ever constructed, and Brunelleschi’s design is an engineering marvel. You can find thousands of articles that can describe how he managed to pull this dome off, and I’m sure they do it more justice than I ever could, so please do Google away.
Today, we’re going to concentrate on the cathedral’s breathtaking exterior. As with so much about this amazing place, it came about in stages, designed by many architects, created by thousands of skilled artisans, over centuries. The design for the church was approved in 1294, right about the time Pope Boniface XIII, the evil guy I recently wrote about here, was coming into power. In fact, it was he who sent the first papal legate to Florence, in order to lay the first stone for the cathedral in 1296.
As beautiful as this church is, my awe actually stems from its timeline. This gorgeous edifice was built at a time when we did not have power tools or motor-powered cranes, or diesel trucks to transport millions of tons of marble. Many families worked their entire lives on this building, for several generations, knowing that even their grandchildren weren’t going to see it completed.
For the first 81 years, Santa Reparata, the much smaller church that this cathedral was being built to replace, still stood inside the cathedral’s walls, and people still attended services there, right in the construction zone. (It was finally torn down in 1375, and the cathedral wasn’t officially consecrated until 1436. I tried to determine what people did for services during that 61 year period, but had no luck. I have no doubt that such resourceful people figured it out.)
This project must have taught people a great deal about patience and perseverance, too. The first architect was a guy named Di Cambio, and for the first 6 years, work under his supervision went on like gangbusters. It must have been a noisy, exciting sight to behold.
The exterior was covered in monochrome marble, in 3 colors: white, pink, and green. Each color came from a different part of Tuscany. The back and sides of the building were mainly alternating horizontal and vertical bands of color. They were all so expertly fitted that you can barely see where one type of marble ends and the next begins. Once that was in, the back and sides remained relatively the same from that day to this. It’s the façade that changed.
In 1302, unfortunately, Di Cambio died before the front wall of the church was completed. This model of what it must have looked like at that time can be found in the Duomo Museum next door. The project lost momentum for about the next 50 years. I’m sure the Black Death, which wiped out more than half of the population, didn’t help.
Nevertheless, the people did rally, and by 1375, they had made enough progress to where they were comfortable tearing the little, interior church down. Five years after that, they considered the cathedral finished, with the exception of the dome. They knew they didn’t have the construction expertise to build that dome yet. But they were confident that they would, someday. Even at the time it finally was built, they didn’t have the mathematical tools to calculate the stresses that this dome would place upon the building. They mainly relied on intuition. Brunelleschi finally figured out the dome dilemma and it was installed in 1436, and the church was finally consecrated. Yay!
And yet, there was still the matter of the half-done façade. They finally got around to holding a design competition for it in 1490-91, but ultimately, it came to nothing, and the façade wouldn’t improve for another 85 years. (In fact, as you’ll see, it would get worse.)
Meanwhile, it was decided that statues would stand atop each of the buttresses, and many were made, but for various reasons, none were ever installed. And this includes Michelangelo’s masterpiece, David, which we’ll be discussing in another post. At 6 tons, it was deemed to be too heavy.
In 1587-88, the Medici family decided to tear down the existing façade, because they decided it was too old fashioned. Another design competition was held, but it ended in a huge corruption scandal, so the people of Florence were left to gaze at an ugly brick façade for centuries. (Centuries!)
The final design competition was held in 1864. The competitors had a challenge on their hands, because they were told it had to blend in with the rest of the cathedral, had to copy the Romanesque style of the nearby bell tower and baptistry, and yet also had to seamlessly transition into a 19th century Gothic Revival style so it wouldn’t look too outdated. (No pressure there!) The judges must have taken this competition very seriously, because they did not declare a winner until 1871. The winner was Emilio De Fabris, and work did not begin on the façade until 1876.
Sadly, De Fabris never got to see the work completed. He died in 1883. Luckily, he left detailed plans behind. The façade was completed, finally, in 1887.
The end? Nope. The bronze doors didn’t get designed and installed until 1899-1903. And even today, about 1/3 of the cathedral’s exterior is covered in scaffolding so that it may be restored, as modern pollution has taken its toll.
609 years. That’s a lot of time, effort, patience, money, procrastination, debate, and scandal. But the final result is like nothing we will ever produce again. In modern times, governments and bureaucracies in general are not going to commit their budgets to projects that won’t give them results that they will be able to see and take credit for. They’re not going to commit to something that monumental. They are too cynical to believe that future generations will take the baton after their part of the race has been run.
I fear that the cynicism the comes with modernity breeds mediocrity. And frankly, I can’t see a logical way to combat that. If you have any ideas, please put them in the comments below. Meanwhile, here’s a brief video we took of the cathedral and the tower so you can get a sense of what it’s like in its three-dimensional, noisy, Florentine glory. Enjoy!
To summarize, here’s a simple timeline for the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore:
1294: design approved.
1296: first stone laid.
1302: Di Cambio dies, construction slows.
1348: Black Death
1375: Santa Reparata finally torn down.
1380: Cathedral, all but the dome, finished.
1436: Dome in, cathedral finally consecrated.
1490-1491: First design competition for the façade.
1501-1504: Michelangelo’s David completed.
1587-1588: Di Cambio’s half finished façade torn down, but second competition ends in a corruption scandal.
1864: Third design competition held.
1871: Competition finally won by Emilio De Fabris.
1876: Work began on façade.
1883: De Fabris dies.
1887: Façade finally completed.
1899-1903: Bronze doors designed and installed.
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