The Duomo

Okay, so I have made it to Florence! I found the hostel within ten minutes and despite the numbers not being in order and skipping the one I was looking for, it really was not a big problem. I got to the room and just laid down. Two of the beds were taken and the one above me was empty. I just opened my computer and began to type and relax. I was so tired, I did not want to do anything!

Fortunately, my roommate Nicole walked in and began talking to me. She is from Oregon and was about to go out and explore some more and asked if I wanted to come along. She had already been in Florence for a couple of days and quickly showed me around. The streets were similar to France, perhaps a bit bigger than the smaller villages but nothing too different. We saw lots of venders set up along one road and kept walking and then there it was: some magnificently huge ginormous wonderful beautiful unremarkable church. I found out the next day on my tour that all of the town of Florence had to pay fees and taxes to build it. It is the first thing that someone would see when entering the town from the entrance wall. It was opened in the 1400s although the outside was not finished until the 1600s.



Nicole walked me around the side and there was a big dome. She said that she wanted to go up it and although I would not have thought of it, I figured, why not? The first entrance that we went to we are guessing was to get in and we were not allowed in. Then we found the one to go to the top of the dome. It was 8euro and 463 steps to the top. Narrow, small, claustrophobic, steep stairs were climbed. We got to the top of the inside of the church and walked around the perimeter of the dome. Up until this point, I never got why the Sistine Chapel was so well talked about, but now I had an idea. It was amazing! We took a short break of pictures before going on.



I learned later that the dome is about 137 by 53 something or other (sorry).The greatest architect was hired to build the dome as for years there was just a hole in the church. They had never built a dome that big and needed a professional. They chose this man because he was the only one to propose a plan without needing scaffolding and needing wood and bricks and plaster to make it as that would be like making it twice. He only took 9 years to make it (?) and it is puzzling to mathematicians, architects, engineers how he did it. Apparently he had figured a way to do this like building an igloo where the bricks support each other but nobody really knows hows.



We walked to the top of the dome and walked around outside. We saw wonderful views of all of Florence and took lots of pictures. We headed down and I was happy that we had come at the end of the day, nobody was headed up, which meant we did not have to deal with two way traffic on half person size stairs.