Florence - the Duomo   |    Florence Duomo

The Republic of Florence began to plan this Duomo
in the late 1200's AD,
when Dante was growing up,
to replace the old cathedral that was too small and old.

The government of Florence raised money to
pay for their new cathedral with a tax on people's wills.
The new church was very big - it is the fourth biggest church in the world -
and so it was very hard to build.

Arnolfo di Cambio,
the first architect to work on the Duomo,
designed the duomo in the Gothic style,
with a main nave and two side aisles.
But after di Cambio died in 1302, and a
new group of men took over the government of Florence,
work stopped for a long time. In 1334,
the artist Giotto agreed to work on the Duomo,
but he only had time to build the campanile
before he died three years later in 1337.

Twenty-seven years later, in 1375, workmen actually
tore down the old cathedral and began building the new one,
somewhat modernized from the original plan which was
now almost a hundred years old. In 1418, with most of the
cathedral built, Brunelleschi designed a
great dome to go over the high altar at the crossing,
and worked out how to build it.
The cathedral was basically finished in 1436,
even though the red, white,
and green marble on the outside was not
finished until four hundred  of years later.

You can see inside, there are a lot of fresco paintings
by Paolo Uccello.