Baptistery of San Giovanni & Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise

Why is it significant?

Stand with your back to the cathedral steps and face the octagon of white and green marble in front of you, striped like a giant medieval jewel box.

Key Facts

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Stand with your back to the cathedral steps and face the octagon of white and green marble in front of you, striped like a giant medieval jewel box. On the side facing the cathedral, a pair of golden doors glows even on a grey morning, and there is almost always a little crowd pressed against the railings, phones raised.

This is the Baptistery of San Giovanni, dedicated to the patron saint of Florence, and it is older than almost anything around it. It was consecrated in 1059, yet for centuries Florentines insisted it had once been a Roman temple of Mars. Every child of the city was baptised inside, and Dante was one of them. Far from home, writing the Inferno, he still calls it my beautiful San Giovanni.

In 1401 the wealthy cloth merchants' guild announced a competition for a new set of bronze doors. Each finalist had to cast one trial panel showing the sacrifice of Isaac. Two young men stood out: a stubborn goldsmith called Filippo Brunelleschi, and Lorenzo Ghiberti, barely in his twenties. Ghiberti won. Both trial panels survive, side by side, in the Bargello museum, and Florentines still argue about the verdict. Those first doors took Ghiberti over twenty years. Then the guild asked him for another pair... and they took him almost thirty more.

The second pair is the one in front of you: ten gilded panels of Old Testament stories in which streets recede, crowds overlap and hills melt into the distance, as if bronze could have depth. The story goes that Michelangelo called them worthy to be the Gates of Paradise, and the name stuck. Now look closely at the frame. Among the little heads of prophets there is a bald man with a knowing half smile. That is Ghiberti himself, signing his life's work with his own face.

What you are looking at today is a faithful copy. In November 1966 the flooded Arno surged through this square and tore several panels from the doors, and after decades of careful restoration the originals now live indoors, a few minutes from here. As for the loser of 1401, legend says Brunelleschi went off to Rome to measure ancient ruins, and came back with an idea far bigger than a door. Walk along the right-hand side of the cathedral and look up.