It is best to enter the Piazza del Duomo from the Via de' Martelli,
the Via de' Cerretani, the Via Calzaioli, or the Via Pecori, because
then one comes instantly upon the campanile too. The upper windows--so
very lovely--may have been visible at the end of the streets, with
Brunelleschi's warm dome high in the sky beside them, but that was
not to diminish the effect of the first sight of the whole. Duomo and
campanile make as fair a couple as ever builders brought together: the
immense comfortable church so solidly set upon the earth, and at its
side this delicate, slender marble creature, all gaiety and lightness,
which as surely springs from roots within the earth. For one cannot
be long in Florence, looking at this tower every day and many times a
day, both from near and far, without being perfectly certain that it
grows--and from a bulb, I think--and was never really built at all,
whatever the records may aver.

The interior of the Duomo is so unexpected that one has the
feeling of having entered, by some extraordinary chance, the wrong
building. Outside it was so garish with its coloured marbles, under
the southern sky; outside, too, one's ears were filled with all the
shattering noises in which Florence is an adept; and then, one step,
and behold nothing but vast and silent gloom. This surprise is the more
emphatic if one happens already to have been in the Baptistery. For the
Baptistery is also coloured marble without, yet within it is coloured
marble and mosaic too: there is no disparity; whereas in the Duomo
the walls have a Northern grey and the columns are brown. Austerity
and immensity join forces.

When all is said the chief merit of the Duomo is this immensity. Such
works of art as it has are not very noticeable, or at any rate do