L'Italo-Americano

L'Italo-Americano THURSDAY, AUGUST 20, 2020 www.italoamericano.org 4 BARBARA MINAFRA NEWS & FEATURES TOP STORIES PEOPLE EVENTS I magine 37 thousand t o n s a b o v e y o u r h e a d , 1 1 6 m e t e r s towards the sky, your eyes lost in admira- tion of the 700 figures in the 3 . 6 0 0 s q u a r e m e t e r s o f Vasari and Zuccari's Last Judgement. A lantern bru- shes up against the sky, while your feet feel as if they were a v i d l y c l i m b i n g i n v i s i b l e steps, so much is the desire to touch that marvel, which seems to defy all laws of gra- vity. Experts say it's made up o f m o r e t h a n 4 m i l l i o n bricks, all from the kilns that o n c e s t o o d w h e r e t h e M u s e o d e l l ' O p e r a d e l Duomo is today. But their immense weight disappears while admiring one of Italy's most famous skylines.We're in Florence and what stands above you is an extraordi- nary architectural miracle, something only a fool or a genius — you may think — could conceive, an incredi- ble, clever work that came into being in only 14 years, 6 centuries ago exactly. It was August 1420 when F i l i p p o B r u n e l l e s c h i undertook a project destined to write the history of archi- tecture, to become the sym- bol of the Renaissance, to celebrate the rise to power of the Medicis, to embody a golden age of art and beauty: b u i l d i n g a d o m e f o r t h e Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. Something no human eye had ever seen before. A dome that is not only beautiful, innovative and enormous in size, but that retains, still today, the pri- macy of being the largest brick cupola ever built on Earth. Not a cupola but the cupola, the model for all others to come, first of all t h a t o f S t . P e t e r i n t h e Vatican, based on a design by Michelangelo. The point is not only that such a large dome had never been built since the times of the Roman Pantheon (1st century AD), b u t a l s o t h a t t r a d i t i o n a l techniques seemed fully ina- dequate for a project of that h e i g h t a n d w i d t h . I t w a s unthinkable to build a woo- den scaffolding more than ninety meters high and then what kind of wood could, even temporarily, support such a large roof? Brunelleschi's revolutio- nary idea had a name: free- standing. The cupola was built without using the tradi- t i o n a l w o o d s u p p o r t i n g structure known in Italian as "centine." Instead, two ogi- val-shaped stone and brick calottes are connected to each other over a diameter of 45.5 meters, unloading weight and self-supporting each other. How? Through a double vault with a hollow space (an internal shell more than wo meters thick, and an external one with a diffe- rent curvature and a thick- ness that decreases as it rises upwards) and a "herringbo- ne" structure used to arran- ge the internal vault's sup- port bricks: vertical bricks are placed at regular distan- ce on the horizontal ones to b e a r t h e i r w e i g h t . B r u n e l l e s c h i u n d e r s t o o d that, if the walls of all the eight curving segments of t h e c u p o l a s t a r t e d a t t h e same level, the whole struc- ture would be supported and couldn't collapse. It was a full-blown chal- lenge, an undertaking dee- med impossible. Until then, all projects to complete the church designed by Arnolfo di Cambio at the end of the 1 3 t h c e n t u r y h a d f a i l e d . Florence had been waiting for someone able to finish its cathedral for 120 years. Works on the construction of the wonderful church that s t a n d s a t t h e h e a r t o f Florence had begun in 1296, but stopped at its octagonal d r u m . T h e a r c h i t e c t u r a l techniques of the time were inadequate to bring such a project to an end. Too high, too wide, too heavy: being able to voltare la cupola, building the cupola, was like solving the enigma of the Sphinx. A view of Brunelleschi's breathtaking cupola: it's been standing for six centuries (Photo: Eugeniya Telennaya/Dreamstime) Continued to page 6 Florence's cupola turns 600

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