Campanile di Giotto

Rising beside the cathedral's facade, Giotto's Bell Tower trades two metres of height for the best-proportioned view in Florence. Begun by Giotto in 1334 and finished by Andrea Pisano and Francesco Talenti, it sheathes a stair of 414 steps in white, green and red marble, and its niches once held an open-air museum of fourteenth-century sculpture.

Why it matters

The regional tourism board gives the tower's dimensions plainly: 84.70 metres high and 15 metres square, clad like the cathedral in white, red and green marble, and counted among the finest statements of fourteenth-century Florentine Gothic. Giotto laid out the tower in 1334, in the last years of a career that had already changed painting; on his death the site passed to Andrea Pisano, and the structure was completed in 1359 by Francesco Talenti, who enlarged the upper levels with the great twin-light windows that give the crown its airiness. UNESCO's citation for the historic centre names the Campanile of Giotto alongside the cathedral and the Baptistery among the works that anchor Florence's outstanding universal value. For visitors the tower works two ways: as sculpture gallery and as viewing platform, with the Brunelleschi dome close enough to study from arm's length.

What to notice

The exterior is a stone encyclopedia. Its sculptural cycle ranks among the most complex of the Middle Ages: fifty-six relief carvings run in two registers, and sixteen life-size statues filled the niches, made by the leading Florentine masters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries — Andrea Pisano, Donatello and Luca della Robbia among them. Read the programme in order: creation and fall in the hexagonal panels, human activities and the liberal arts in the lozenges, then planets, virtues and sacraments; prophets, sibyls and patriarchs stood in the niches above. Donatello's relief of the Sacrifice of Isaac, a touchstone of fifteenth-century naturalism, belonged to this cycle. All of the originals have been moved indoors for protection and are displayed in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, so the tower you climb shows copies while the museum holds the treasury — plan to see both halves of the story.

Context and history

The campanile grew with the cathedral campaign of the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, which still administers it. Its construction history is a relay of Florence's best architects: Giotto's project established the strong base and the marble skin; Pisano carried the work to the second register; Talenti raised the shaft, widened the upper openings and brought the design to its luminous conclusion in 1359, without the spire first imagined. Reliefs and statues were gradually substituted with copies as the originals' condition worsened, a conservation practice that transferred the whole cycle, panel by panel, to the museum founded by the Opera. The tower thus survives as a rare case where a monument's decorative programme can be read at eye level indoors, in the order it was designed.