Die Geschichte
This is first of all a working cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore, the mother church of Florence, and the thing that draws crowds is engineering as much as art: Filippo Brunelleschi's brick dome, raised between 1420 and 1436 without the usual wooden centring and still the largest masonry dome ever built.
For art-seekers the paintings sit mostly on the walls and the underside of that dome. Look up inside and you meet a vast Last Judgement, begun by Giorgio Vasari in the 1570s and finished after his death by Federico Zuccari, the join between their styles faintly visible.
Down at eye level are two frescoes made to stand in for costly bronze monuments. Paolo Uccello painted a green horseman in 1436, a memorial to the English mercenary John Hawkwood, who had fought for the city. And in 1465 Domenico di Michelino set Dante at the cathedral door, holding his poem, with Hell, Purgatory and Florence itself laid out behind him.
