Florence Trip - A customer’s review

There are only a few people who can accidentally stumble upon such perfection on their travels. One of ours happened on our first visit to Florence. We arrived late in the day in the car we had hired.  After setting into our hotel and enjoying a superb meal at Toscano we started strolling, on a wonderfully warm, moonlit evening, in searching for the Arno in Florence.

My friend Jim was on a going on about how there couldn’t ever ever be a site that awed and astounded him as much as the Duomo in Milano. Well I knew Florence had it secrets.  Just as he was about to repeat this claim we turned the corner and there it was. Bathed in the moonlight, and hardly any of people around, the marble facades of the Duomo held our gaze, daring Jim to not change his mind there and then! But change it he did. (Mind you, we never again saw the Duomo or its piazza as bereft of the throngs of tourists that usually crowd the area).

In the next few days in Florence, we cooled off in the shelter of the huge cathedral; we explored the inside, fascinated by the walls, ceilings, and the magnificent dome. We climbed the campanile and climbed up into the dome to get a better look at the fabulous Dantesque murals. (I love those murals with devils and demons taking the evil to hell!). But nothing will ever compare with that first glimpse of this extremely beautiful Cathedral.

An interesting story is the history of the Duomo in Florence is the competition to determine who would build the actual dome. When Brunelleschi was asked how he proposed to build it he replied “If I told you how, then you would know how to do it”. An archeological wonder for all time, the dome was open for over one hundred years, while Masses were conducted with birds among the congregation and rain pouring in.