The whole time in Florence I had looked forward to climbing the Duomo.  Both Jenn and I read Brunelleschi’s Dome before the trip and it’s a fascinating (if a little dry) book about the dome and it’s architect.  Knowing that it would save us time in Florence, we had bought the Firenze Card which is like a ticket to all the attractions the first day we arrived.  Here at the Duomo, it let us skip the line to buy tickets.  The inside of the dome is painted completely with a religious mural.  From the ground, it seems fairly standard (and it is), but when you get closer to it you see that they used to be very concerned about hell.

In the book, we read a lot about Brunelleschi’s innovations that allowed him to build the dome without using the internal support system of his day (filling the dome with dirt).  He used a herringbone pattern in the bricklaying to give the dome its strength even with wet mortar.

The stairwell leads out onto a walkway around the inner dome where we got a closer look at the mural painted there.  After walking around the inner dome, a door lets you outside to view the city.  It was an amazing view of Florence!

 

 

After we finished our tour of the Duomo, we visited the Galileo Science Museum.  It was a pretty interesting museum with a few hands on experiments Galileo did while exploring subjects such as gravity.  We got pictures of some old timepieces and microscopes.