The Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore took 140 years to build and stands bare-faced until its final act. Construction began in 1296 to replace an older church considered too small for Florence's ambitions, but by 1436 when Brunelleschi finished his dome, the cathedral still lacked a proper façade. The medieval front was dismantled in 1587 and the church stood naked for three centuries, its Gothic body exposed, until Emilio De Fabris won a competition in 1871 to finally dress it. The current pink, white and green marble façade was completed in 1887, making it younger than the Brooklyn Bridge.

Brunelleschi's dome remains the largest brick dome ever built, assembled from over four million bricks laid in a herringbone pattern that locked them together without wooden scaffolding. The structure frightened the commissioners who made Lorenzo Ghiberti watch over Brunelleschi to stop him if things went wrong. They needn't have worried. The double-shell design with embedded stone and iron chains has stood for six centuries, weighing 37,000 tons.
VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours explain how Brunelleschi convinced skeptical patrons by smashing an egg, trace the dome's ingenious herringbone brickwork that made the impossible structure self-supporting during construction, reveal why Florence's most famous landmark spent 300 years without its face, and connect the cathedral's long evolution from Gothic foundations through Renaissance innovation to 19th-century patriotic revival in Italian flag colours.