The story of this place
Santa Maria del Fiore was begun in 1296 with a hole at its heart: a crossing so wide that no one knew how to roof it. For over a century the gap gaped until, in 1420, the goldsmith Filippo Brunelleschi won a competition with a radical plan to raise a self-supporting double-shell dome of over 4 million bricks laid in a herringbone pattern—without the wooden centering everyone believed essential. Completed in 1436, it remains the largest masonry dome in the world. Brunelleschi invented hoisting machines to lift the materials and reportedly kept his methods secret. The lantern was finished after his death in 1446. Climbing its 463 steps between the two shells is to trace a Renaissance engineering miracle.