Florence Waited

“Come back in the morning. It’s cooler and far less congested.” She took Julie’s hand. “We can still see the Baptistery and the Cathedral today. They’re never crowded.”

They returned to the edge of the Piazza and slipped inside Ghilberti’s towering bronze doors into the relatively small Baptistery. The noise, heat, and chaos of the square vanished inside where, at one time, every resident of Florence had been baptized. Later, they entered the main Cathedral, which was more cavernous than it appeared from the plaza. Though there were hundreds of people inside, it felt empty. The visitors studied the artwork and the interior of the Dome, prayed quietly, or lit candles.

“My dad died five years ago, but my mom died of a brain tumor when I was in college,” Lucy said. “The cancer in her head so whacked her out that she didn’t even know she had kids and a husband. But she said her rosary every day until the end.”

“I’m so sorry, Lucy. We’re both on our own,” said Julie, touching Lucy’s arm. “Losing a parent when you’re young leaves a hole in your heart that can’t be easily filled.” 

Julie lit candles for her parents and Lucy for hers, which joined the thousands burning for the dead, the sick, and the remembered in the cathedral. They sat in a pew and listened to the organist practicing with the faint smell of incense in the air until the cathedral closed for the day. Lucy invited Julie to join her for dinner with friends from Brooklyn, but Julie refused, saying she was too tired.

She walked back to her hotel, worried it was now too late for her to learn to be independent. It might be like learning to drive. If one missed the window of opportunity between teenage indestructibility and the adult realization that driving was propelling a lethal weapon at deadly speeds, it was impossible to be a confident driver. She had loved her parents, but she’d used them to hide from life until her mother died. She knew that now.

*

After a dreamless sleep, Julie returned to the Cathedral the following morning. Lucy was correct; there were far fewer people in the Piazza. Most of Florence rose late. She found the entrance to the Dome and waited in line. The guard let in a few dozen people at a time. The stone stairway was cool and very worn. The passage of millions of hands smoothed the walls to a sleek shine. It smelled of dust, stone, and sweat. 

At first, she avoided touching anything and held a tissue to her nose. The steps were shallow, made for tiny medieval feet, but the stairway was straight and wide. After each flight, there was a landing where groups of ascenders congregated, sipping from water bottles and catching their breath. Eight flights up and completely winded, Julie considered giving up the hike, but there was no room to descend. The steady procession upward blocked her path. 

“Maybe this was a bad idea,” Julie said, trying not to panic. 

She could hear her mother muttering that Julie had never finished what she had started. She breathed as deeply as she could and used the walls for support as she continued upward. People chatted quietly in dozens of languages as they rose and commented on the graffiti that covered every surface despite signs forbidding it. Some inscriptions may have been old, but Julie could see much of it was recent. Bob was not a Renaissance name. 

 “I’m just standing here, letting my grandkids get a good head start,” said a woman well into her seventies to anyone walking by. 

Julie chatted with her until she felt ready to continue. 

A few flights later, her knees were on fire, and Julie started to get dizzy. She thought she’d have to wait on the side again to rest when she reached the walkway around the Dome’s base. From here, she could see down to the massive floor of the Cathedral, where tiny people were looking up at the altarpieces and wall frescos like she had the previous day.

Difficult to see from the cathedral floor, one of the most sizeable Renaissance paintings ever created was installed inside the Dome, The Last Judgment by Vasari and Zaccaro. Julie could almost touch it from the catwalk. The painting was a continuous panorama of hundreds of figures arranged in five tiers.  Naked sinners tortured by fire, amputations, and flogging were on the bottom tier, while the clothed devout, cradled in clouds, were welcomed to Paradise above.  The beatitudes, virtues, choirs of angels, Christ, Mary, and the saints with the twenty-four Elders of the Apocalypse were painted going all the way up to the oculus at the top of the Dome. 

Despite the height, Julie enjoyed viewing the floor, but several people were uncomfortable on the catwalk and hugged the walls. She walked around the circumference of the Dome and enjoyed a good rest before continuing the ascent inside the Dome’s shell.

 “This is worth all the effort,” Julie said to herself. “I didn’t think I could do it, and I’m more than halfway. I have to finish.”

As Lucy promised, windows cut into the outer shell let in a cool breeze and afforded a slice of the sky and a peek of Florence every hundred feet. Julie zigzagged farther and farther upward, resting more and more frequently. 

A guard stopped a woman ahead of her to let a group of people descend from the observation platform at the top. After a few dozen people descended, Julie’s party climbed the steep final stairway to the observation deck at the top of the dome.

When she reached the top step, Julie gasped. All of Florence lay beneath her. The top of Brunelleschi’s Dome was the tallest structure in Florence by law. From the Dome’s platform, the orange clay roofs, the hidden gardens, and the narrow streets below were arrayed like a miniature medieval toy village.