72. Pistoia

We had some extra time so we stopped off in Pistoia on our train back to Florence. Because it never really flourished, having been annexed to Florence since 1320, it felt properly sized for its current population, and therefore livelier. Its cathedral complex is on a very pretty square, but as you can see from the aerial photo, the cathedral seems to have been squeezed in as an afterthought. The main square looks onto the blank side of the church, while the facade of the church really faces nothing. The baptistry is tucked in a far corner. Adjoining the facade is the palace of Pistoia's dominant family, which is now an interesting Etruscan museum.

The city has two major churches, the Duomo, which is the cathedral, and San Michele, which everyone mistakes for the cathedral. San Michele is the one that looks very majestic from the front, until you peer around back and see that the facade is a fake, with a much smaller church hiding behind the oversize facade. But it's a very pretty sight in a grand plaza. The actual cathedral is done in a similar style (it's Pisan for those of you who are connoissuers of Tuscan church architecture) dominating its own somewhat dusty square.

Inside the Duomo is considerably more subdued and, in fact, rather boring. The contrast between the crazy marble patterns outside and the plain white interior is striking, but even more striking is the absence of important religious art. Considering Florence is the epicenter of the Renaissance, which focused almost exclusively on religious art, it's cupboards are pretty bare.

Despite its central importance, the baptistry is completely dwarfed by the Duomo, or cathedral. It was built in the 1290's by a fairly lazy architect. It's a massive place built with a huge dome over the center of the cross. Problem is the lazy architect didn't know how to build the dome, so he just left a huge hole in the middle after building the rest of the church and moved on to another project. Then the loser of the bronze door competition from the previous post, Brunelleschi, came to the rescue. Suicidal after the loss of the bronze door, he took up the dome task with gusto, notwithstanding that he had no architectural training. But somehow, from studying books and other churches, he figured out how to build the world's biggest unsupported dome, and his dome is certainly more deeply etched in every tourist's mind than the little bronze door.

The church is quite a statement, and I think a beautiful one, although most art historians think it over the top and a bit of a shambles. It also doesn't look like a church, and it's got much less religious art and symbolism than almost any other church. Its most famous priest was Savanarola, who in the late 15th century was a crazy fundamentalist, railing about the sinners and condemning everyone to hell. Things came to a head when he ordered the whole city to assemble in the plaza and burn all their ball gowns, musical instruments, paintings, jewelry etc., which they dutifully did. (This is the Bonfire of the Vanities, if you're wondering where that expression came from.) After they destroyed their entire cultural heritage, though, they had second thoughts, and decided to burn him as well.

We then walked up to tourism's ground zero, the Duomo. This was the only place reminiscent of my previous trips to Florence, jam packed with tourists, mostly eating gelato and sitting all over the plaza wherever there was space. The photos in this entry are of the oldest part of the Duomo complex, the Baptistry. The baptistry was founded in the 7th century, although every generation embelished it so it's quite a sensory overload. It must have been even more so every new year's day, when all the babies born in Florence the previous year were assembled in this cavernous echo chamber to get baptized and presumably scream at the top of their lungs. Heaven.

The baptistry is most famous for its bronze doors, one seet of which is pictured here. In 1401 the city held a famous competition to design the last remaining set of doors, won by Ghiberti. He then spent 27 years on the doors, and are considered the first art work of the Renaissance and a key influence for Michelangelo and other subsequent Renaissance painters. Although again it's hard to really see the difference, because everyone knows this story these doors are swamped with the tourist paparazzi, while the others,which were equally famous in their day, are ignored. For my undereducated money, the gold mosaics in the ceiling are the real stunners.