Duomo (Santa Maria del Fiore & Santa Reparata)

Now known commonly as the Duomo, the Florentine cathedral is most appropriately called Santa Maria del Fiore (St. Mary of the Flower). It may surprise you to discover that during almost all of the church’s history, its façade was just as bare as San Lorenzo’s is now. Proposals to remedy that problem were accepted in 1876, and what you see here was complete by 1887. The Museum of the Duomo provides an excellent history of its construction and explanation of how the older church (Santa Reparata) was turned into the new one.  Included among the façade’s gems is a bust of Dante.

Below: statue of Arnolfo di Cambio by Luigi Pampaloni (1830), sculptor also of Brunelleschi nearby and of Leonardo da Vinci in the Piazzale degli Uffizi. Born in Florence around 1232, Arnolfo was at the apex of his career while Dante lived here.

Arnolfo completed the Loggia of Orsanmichele, vastly restructured the Badia, planned the new walls and began the transformation of Santa Reparata into a church that could compete with those of Florence’s rivals. He did all this during Dante’s twenties and early thirties, although our poet never mentions him. 

The silence may be due to the fact that Arnolfo is also the artist who created the well-known statue of Pope Boniface VIII pictured below. Scholars believe that Arnolfo may have enjoyed a special relationship with Boniface, who was of course Dante’s most evil foe.

In fact, this statue was at the center of a heated debate in the late 1290s over whether it was proper for a pope to plan his own monument instead of accepting the normal horizontal tombstone. (This was long before Michelangelo worked for Pope Julius II.) After all was said and done, the statue ended up here in the Museum of the Duomo and Boniface was buried in a sarcophagus in St. Peter’s in Rome. 

During Dante’s life in Florence, the spiritual solemnity of the Piazza del Duomo radiated principally from the Baptistry of San Giovanni and the tombs around it. Santa Reparata was a sacred place, but not anything like it would become. Notable figures once buried here include Farinata degli Uberti (1264), although his bones were exhumed and thrown into the Arno when he was posthumously proclaimed a heretic in 1283, Arnolfo di Cambio himself (1310), Giotto (1337), and Forese Donati (1296), friend of Dante and older brother of Corso.

As you descend the steps into the crypt area, you’ll see a very old piece of marble bearing a cross and the coat of arms of the Buonaguisi family (below), who were staunch Ghibellines. The Buonaguisi were part of the Galigai clan.

Above: coat of arms of the Buonaguisi family

Below: the tomb slab of Jacopo Cavalcanti (d. 1302) in Santa Reparata. Carved only a few months after Dante was exiled, this tombstone is roughly the same age as the Divine Comedy.