Il Duomo

Thursday involved another morning at the Uffizi, as recounted earlier, with the privilege of contemplating many masterpieces in almost complete solitude, then a bland pizza for lunch (Florentine cooking doesn’t use much salt), some marketering and onto Il Duomo, the dome of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, the largest brick dome ever constructed!

We cheerfully paid our 8 Euro each for admission, thinking we’d both be able to contemplate the dome from floor level and then I’d climb the steps to the top, with Net safely left in that state of contemplation on the floor, as she has a fear of heights. Alas, entrance to the Dome means exactly that: as soon as you go through the turnstile you start climbing the stairs and immediately Net felt very uncomfortable. I’m not a big fan of heights myself particularly but I was determined to continue and encouraged Net to keep ascending. When we reached a small sanctuary where we could at least not be on the steps, we’d already scaled 150 of them, all over 500 years old. Net knew she wouldn’t be able to face the ordeal and I was feeling rather daunted myself. Reluctantly, I left her on the landing in the company of a group of marble sculptures and kept ascending. The staircase got narrower and more corkscrew-like until I started to feel dizzy, not from the increasing height but from continually being obliged to turn around and around as I scaled the now infernal steps (and I though the Inferno was downwards!) It was hot and claustrophobic; which was a strange sensation because you’re also aware that at any moment you’re going to be rudely released from claustrophobia to the very opposite sensation and look down from 90 metres to Florence below.

Suddenly you come to an opening and you step into the inside of the dome itself, suspended on a little platform, the frescoed walls adorned with ghastly images of purgatory at eye level and heavenly images of heaven at the very top and you look down to the floor of the cathedral and feel very nervous, unless you’re one of those strange people who likes rock-climbing and other such insane pursuits. A young French couple were at the entrance as I arrived and the male half was unable to step into the dome, despite encouragement from his girlfriend.

But there are so many more steps to go and they get narrower and more twisted and even more calustrophia-inducing, especially when there are many people either in front of you or attempting to squeeze past you as they come back down.

Finally you’re at the top and it’s marvellous! It’s actually not nearly as frightening as being inside the dome with the frescoes because you can’t see directly to the street below - the curvature of the dome ensures that you can only see a certain distance before it curls away from your view. But you keep thinking about the poor workmen who fixed all those tiles into place or helped haul the 4 million bricks up by hoist.

Florence and the shadow of the Duomo




View from the top of the Duomo

I’d read a brilliant book on the building of the dome, called Brunelleschi’s Dome, a few years before and I’ll read it again when I get back to Oz. It’s an amazing feat of engineering - Brunelleschi was a genius! From Wikipedia: "A modern understanding of physical laws and the mathematical tools for calculating stresses was centuries into the future. Brunelleschi, like all cathedral builders, had to rely on intuition and whatever he could learn from the large scale models he built. To lift 37,000 tons of material, including over 4 million bricks, he invented hoisting machines and lewissons for hoisting large stones."

When I finally came back down to earth, physically and mentally, Net and I set off on another stroll towards the Piazza della Signoria and stumbled upon a heated demonstration in the street. People were yelling through megaphones and blowing whistles and jeering at hapless local politicians as they marched in the same direction as we were going. The chant was “Acqua Publica!”, to do with opposition to a referendum about privatisation of water. It was all quite exciting and impassioned (in Australia the chant “Public Water” wouldn’t have quite the same ring to it).

Tomorrow, an excursion to Certaldo in the Tuscan hills.