Orsanmichele

I don't even remember what I set off looking for when I set off on our first afternoon in Florence. I was probably just trying to orient myself, looking for the cathedral and being able to place other buildings that I might want to visit. And, in an increasingly common turn of events that I hope I can turn into a metaphor for something significant rather than an embarrassing facet of my personality, I got distractedly lost. There was this big square building with statutes of saints, etc, outside. Add the sign and the beggar outside, and I knew I was right outside of a church. So I poked my head in. It happens.

The inside is also just a square building, but pretty well decorated. Then you look to the side and you notice this huge cage of gold and curly things. It's a tabernacle around a picture of Mary and Baby Jesus (yes, Baby Jesus gets two capital letters. Don't ask me why). On the left, there's an altar to St. Anne (the mother of Mary, grandmother of Jesus, according to wikipedia [not attested to in the canoncial gospels, which is why most of us don't know what that is... I think {don't tell me all my friends secretly knew of St. Anne and never told me!}]). My parenthesis are getting ridiculous.

It's quiet and cool and nice. There was this guy walking around with a nametag, which made me think he was an official sort of person, but then he stopped to read the sign explaining the history of the building and this made me think that he just stopped in on his way back to work, which made me think even more of him. Then he stopped someone from taking a picture and blew that illusion. Still, as far as church guards go, he's one of the nicer ones I've met. And he did read the sign, which is more interest than most church guards I've seen.

The history of the church is actually pretty interesting. It started out as a granary, or a place to store and distribute grain, but then someone drew a picture of Mary on a pillar. People started to pay their respects to the new picture of Mary just as do for all the ones on the street corners, and, after a miracle happened, the number of devoted grew so large that they couldn't use the room as a granary anymore. They moved the grain upstairs and the chutes they used to distribute it to the ground floor can still be seen.

Eventually, the guilds in Florence turned the whole thing into a church (now with a museum on the second floor) and commissioned Florentine artists to design each guild's contribution to the church. The statues on the outside of the building drew me in. I didn't take pictures, but Wikipedia can show them to you better than me if you click here! Donatello gets to make another appearance in my blog, which is a total win.

I love this church's story. I love that the current building was made to be a place of commerce and that the faithful turned it into a holy place. So many of the buildings I see were built for the purpose of housing a church. It's wonderful to see one that grew into that duty. Even though it might now just be a stop for tired sightseers, to whom any cool quiet place out of the sun is a welcome respite, at one point in time, faithful people caused businessmen to change their plans. And I like seeing that.

Florence Duomo

The cathedral in Florence is huge.

One of my selling points for my proposal for this whole thing was that you simply can't get an idea of what being in these spaces is like from a book. My primary example of this was the size of most of these cathedrals- I can tell you that the building is 502 feet long (like a football field and a half), 124 feet wide, 295 feet wide at the transept (which is almost a football field- sorry, I have no other good conception of distance [silly marching band]) and 75 feet tall... in the nave of the cathedral. It's 375 to the top of the dome.

I just...

I can't...

Like, what even? 

It's just massive. It's impressively big. Which is part of the reason why it was begun in the first place.

The Duomo di Firenze (or the Cattedrale Santa Maria del Fiore, St. Mary of the Flower [the flower being the lily, the symbol of Florence]) was actually built after the cathedral in Pisa and a couple of other less-well-known cathedrals around the area. It was built with public funds and set up as a state church in a response to these churches. They started construction in 1296 and finished the nave about a hundred years later (there were plagues and things holding up the project) and the dome in 1436. They pulled out all the local artist stops, which, considering the local artists were people like Donatello, is pretty awesome. Though, I always feel obligated to point out this graph when I talk about Donatello. The end product was the largest dome in the world until modern times. It's even bigger than the dome in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, and was, in fact, a model for domes after it.

It's an impressive building. The exterior is white, green and red marble (mostly white) and it's part of this complex including the baptistery across the way.

It dominates the view of the city from the Piazzale Michelangelo, about a mile and a half away. Climbing up the dome was the worst climb I've ever done, but the view from the top was absolutely gorgeous, so, still, my vote falls in with actually doing dome climbs.

I may have already used this one, but it's so pretty. Soooo preeetttyyyy.

At the same time, you know, with all the impressiveness, it didn't strike me as a particularly holy place. There's an excavation downstairs, which is cool, but right beside it is the gift shop. The gift shop. Call me old fashioned, but I don't think you should be selling things in a church. Outside the walls, in an ajoining building, sure. But actually in the church? Hmmm. Though, in the gift shop's defense, it is downstairs.

And see, the thing is, with these huge buildings, you have these side chapels (the top and arms of the cross, since it's normally laid out in a cruciform plan) and that's normally where mass is held. That huge nave? It's used for the bigger mass ceremonies, I presume like Christmas and Easter, but most of the time, it's only filled with tourists.

And I hate tourists.

Like, I really hate tourists in churches.

I mean, I realize that I act like one, but I generally acknowlege the purpose of the building, you know, as a place dedicated in name if not in practice for the worship of the God of the world's largest monotheistic religion, a gathering place for the faithful, a place of spiritual significance for people. But the person complaining loudly on their way out the door that they can't view a chapel because mass is about to be held in there or the group coming to a consensus that this visit was a waste of their time or the tourist with their camera who steps in front of a person praying in the pews to get a better picture of who knows which window Donatello designed, all these people are missing the point of the building.

Though if they were taking this picture I might be more understanding.

You know, maybe they're not. Maybe all these places I visit are just tourist traps now, designed to intimidate and remind people of the power of the bishops and the cardinals and the pope and the people associated with them. The Duomo has plenty of pictures and statues of the nobles who helped to fund its construction. And it does have a gift shop in its basement.

But I'm a bit opposed to this kind of cynicism. Because I remember that first moment of wonder as I stepped into the large, empty gothic nave.

And I like wonder.