Thursday, 6 november 2025

This was the day to visit the Duomo. Seen here from an adjacent building, it is unbelievably complex, with a zillion spires and a statue in each of hundreds of niches in every possible surface.

The interior is just as impressive, full of memorials, tombs, sarcophagi, tributes, biblical illustrations, etc., as one would expect. The space is immensely long snd tall, dwarfing the little tourist people like us.

Partly because of scaffolding and cleaning equipment blocking some areas, we didn’t explore as much as we might have, but went instead to the Duomo Museum, which was itself impressive on a very different scale.

Models of the Duomo make it easier to see the level of detail in its construction as it was extended and rebuilt over the years:

The museum’s display spaces are as small as the Duomo’s interior is vast, and the visitor’s path winds through a maze of rooms, each one showing many (many) pieces of sculpture and other artifacts from the Duomo’s history. For example, here is Saint Lucy, the patron of stonemasons, whose work subjected them to the risk of eye injuries from slivers of stone. Her eyes are resting on the plate in her hand.

Gargoyles are another form of sculpture, and I was happy to see a whole wall of them in the Museum.

. . . of which this might be my favorite, with its human feet:

Later, we spun the century dial and visited the Museum of the Nineteen-Hundreds, showing a variety of Italian art from the 20th century. (That photo of the Duomo was taken from its 6th-floor window.) It’s far beyond me to summarize the progression of Futurism, Avant-Garde, les Italians de Paris, and pendulum swings back toward more representational standards that are described here, but I think art historians would enjoy this museum.

One sculpture I liked (in bronze, by an artist named Pomodoro) felt surprisingly jarring:

And here’s a thought for the day:

Finally, in a narrow room set up for lectures, I liked the variety of chairs: