Nothing in the city may be built taller than the Brunelleschi dome finished in 1436. I have seen the dome many times.
9 June 2026 – The dome belongs to the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, and it is the work of Filippo Brunelleschi. When you look at a photograph of Florence and notice that its skyline seems strangely, impossibly intact, you are not imagining it. Watch my short clip above.
The city has protected that view, by custom and by law, since the Renaissance. To this day, no building in Florence is permitted to rise higher than the cupola.
What it guards is one of the most astonishing structures ever built. When Brunelleschi began in 1420, no one in Europe knew how to raise a dome that wide. The technology had been lost with the Romans. The cathedral had stood for decades with a hole in its roof, because the span was considered impossible to cover, and the city had essentially gambled that someone would one day work out how.
Brunelleschi built it without the wooden scaffolding everyone assumed was necessary, laying over four million bricks in a self-supporting double shell, one dome inside another, in a herringbone pattern that let each ring hold itself up as it rose.
Six centuries later, it remains the largest masonry dome in the world. Nothing built since, in brick and stone, has surpassed it.
The Italian director Franco Zeffirelli, who was born in Florence, once explained what that means to him:
“When I feel depression creeping in. I return to Florence to gaze at Brunelleschi’s dome. If human genius was able to achieve something so great, then I too can and must try to create, to act, to live”.
That is what a skyline can be when a city decides that beauty is worth protecting.
And almost in the same vein, the Main Altarpiece of Seville Cathedral is considered the largest in all of Christendom and one of the most monumental structures of polychrome and gilded wood in universal art.
Its execution spanned more than 80 years (between 1482 and 1564), which facilitated a stylistic transition from late Gothic to the Renaissance. It measures 26 meters in height, 18 meters in width, and 5 meters in depth, exceeding 400 square meters in extent.
It is primarily carved from walnut and chestnut woods, and covered with an immense layer of gold leaf.
It houses 44 reliefs and more than 200 sculpted figures.
It functioned as a visual catechism for the illiterate faithful of the time.