Climbing The Duomo

 One thing I’ve wanted to do since we got to Florence is climb the Duomo. The Duomo is the big church in the middle of downtown Florence. It towers over the rest of the city. My dad and I got tickets to go Monday morning at 8:15. The tickets we got let us climb up the Duomo and the bell tower.

My dad and I were on the tram by 7:30 on Monday morning. When we got to the center of Florence, we stopped to get some drinks and a croissant before we started our climb. The piazza that the Duomo is in was pretty empty early in the morning. The only other people there were the other people who were going to climb, and shop owners setting up for the day. We waited in line for about 15 minutes, and then they opened up the doors. My dad and I were 8th and 9th in line so we got in pretty fast. We had to go through security, but no one was actually checking anything so we just walked through. As soon as we scanned our tickets to go in, there were stairs. We went really slowly on the first set of stairs because there were some older people in front of us. When we reached a landing, we darted past them and the pace picked up from there. Pretty soon there was no one in sight except for 1 guy far in front of us. Eventually we got to the bottom of the dome. There’s an outer dome that the people outside see, but we were right up along the inside of the inner dome, so we could see all the paintings very clearly. I thought that the paintings looked really cool. We walked halfway around the dome, and then we started going up again. We were climbing in between the inner and outer domes, so it was pretty tight. There was barely any room between my shoulders and the walls. Within a few minutes we reached the top. The views were amazing. We were able to see pretty much the whole city. Since it was still pretty early in the morning there was also fog surrounding buildings, which looked pretty cool. We were up there for 20-30 minutes before they said we had to go down. 

The next day we were back in the center so we decided we should climb the bell tower. This time it was the middle of the day, so we were expecting a bunch of people to be up there. We started to climb the steps, and then we realized that it was 2-way traffic. The steps were so narrow that it was hard to get past people. It felt like we had been climbing for forever by the time we reached the first landing. I don’t know if it was because of the 463 step climb the day before, but I felt worse than I did when we climbed the Duomo even though it was only 414 steps. We had to keep going though. We made it to the second landing a lot quicker. The second landing was about the same height up as the top of the Duomo (not the dome). The climb to the third landing wasn’t that bad either, except for the fact we kept running into people coming down. The climb from the third landing to the top was mostly a spiral staircase, so it was harder to pass people. We eventually made it to the top. The views were pretty great from up here, but we were surrounded by a metal cage, so it wasn’t as cool as it could have been. We got a really great view of the Duomo dome though. We were a little lower than we were the day before, so we were still looking up at the dome. We stayed up there for around 15 minutes, but we had to come down because of the heat. It was the middle of the day so the sun was shining right on us. On the climb down we didn’t encounter that many people, so it wasn’t that bad.

I really enjoyed climbing these structures, but if you only want to do one I would recommend the Duomo. The climb felt so much easier, and you were up even higher. The bell tower had a really great view of the Duomo though, so they both have their own upsides. This week we’re going to Pisa, so I’m hoping we’ll be able to climb the leaning tower there.