Florence's Duomo in Firenze, Florence, Italy | Museum

Welcome to Florence's Duomo, Firenze, Italy.

For 1600 years now, the center of Florentine religious life has been the area known, respectively, as "Piazza San Giovanni" and "Piazza del Duomo". This large, irregular square contains: the Baptistery of Saint John, the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore (the Duomo) with the excavations of Santa Reparata, Giotto's Bell Tower, the Museum of the Opera del Duomo , the Cathedral Canonries, the Lay Confraternity of Mercy, the Bigallo Portico, the Archbishop's Palace, the Column of Saint Zanobius, and the Pisan porphyry columns.

Entering the Cathedral, of Florence's Duomo, Firenze, Italy one is struck by the building's vastness and the sobriety of its furnishings. The color and rich patterning of the exterior, which serve to relate the mass of the structure to the smaller scale of surrounding buildings, here give way to a simplicity that underscores the titanic dimensions of this church - the largest in Europe when it was completed in the 15th century.

The relative bareness of the interior of Santa Maria del Fiore corresponds to the austere spiritual ideal of Florence in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance; it suggests, in architectural terms, the spirituality of the great reformers of Florentine religious life. The enrichment of the interior with splendid pavements in colored marble, and temple-niches on the walls, in fact belongs to a later period.

The bell tower of Santa Maria del Fiore was begun by Giotto in 1334, carried on after his death by Andrea Pisano, and finished in 1359 by Francesco Talenti, who created the large windows at the upper levels. The sculptural decoration of the tower is extremely rich: 56 relief carvings in two registers, and 16 life-size statues in the niches, all by Florentine masters of the l4th and l5th century (among whom Andrea Pisano, Donatello, Luca Della Robbia).