il Duomo

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From the top of the Duomo Florence spreads out between the hills that surround it.

But oddly, just like when you’re on it’s meandering and curving, ground-level streets, you still can’t see it all - it’s courtyards and building celestories continue to suggest, but still hide, the lives and rooms within them even from a vantage point high above them.

The city’s built history is also hidden and only partially revealed in its museums and tour books.

I began reviewing the history of the Duomo in a guide book as we stood in line to get in. I suspected it took over a hundred years to build and in fact the narrative suggested 140 years with multiple artists building literally atop one another’s work.

But the exhibit in the basement of the buildings foundations and Middle Ages and pre-Christian mosaics reveals that the building, the site goes back over a thousand years.

And even then the historical stories chosen to be told are only of the people who won the competitions to build put on by the city’s most prominent guilds.

But think of the thousands upon thousands of laborers who worked laying brick, eating a lunch (carried to work in a pocket) on a scaffold in sun, the choir boys who sang there for years and then heard their own sons sing there, the millions of prayers raised to the rafters of varying heights, the gods that listened, the gods that didn’t, the thousands upon thousands of tourists who came to stand in this same line by foot, by train, by car, by plane. The countless lives that moved around the Duomo, it’s shadow an (only occasionally) admired backdrop to countless countless countless storylines.

Our built environment grows from and (briefly) contains our lives but it cannot hold them.