Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Florence began its cathedral in 1296 and dedicated it to Our Lady of the Flower, the lily of the city, then left in its heart an act of pure faith: an octagonal void more than forty meters wide that no one on earth knew how to roof. For a century the church stood open to the sky, until Filippo Brunelleschi won the competition of 1418 and, between 1420 and 1436, raised the dome without traditional wooden centering, two shells of some four million bricks laid in herringbone spirals, teaching themselves to stand as they climbed. It remains the largest masonry dome ever built, and on the feast of the Annunciation in 1436 Pope Eugene IV consecrated the cathedral beneath it. Giotto's marble bell tower keeps it company; inside, Vasari and Zuccari's vast Last Judgment swirls up inside the cupola, and Domenico di Michelino's painting shows Dante presenting his Comedy to the city that once exiled him. Climb the 463 steps between the two shells, and you stand inside the answered prayer of an entire city.