Right in front of the cathedral sits a smaller, eight-sided building with doors that look like solid gold. That's the Baptistery of San Giovanni, and it's the real old-timer of this square — one of the oldest buildings in Florence, so old that medieval Florentines were convinced it had once been a Roman temple. For centuries, this is where the whole city was baptized. Every Florentine baby, generation after generation. Including, in twelve sixty-five, a boy named Dante — who grew up to write the most famous poem in the Italian language, and still called this place, fondly, my beautiful San Giovanni.
But the reason to stop is the doors. Specifically, a contest.
In fourteen oh-one, the wool merchants who paid for this building announced a competition to design a new set of bronze doors. It became the most important art contest in the city's history — people call it the starting gun of the whole Renaissance. Two young finalists emerged. One was Lorenzo Ghiberti, barely into his twenties
. The other was a goldsmith named Filippo Brunelleschi.
Yes. That Brunelleschi. The dome man. Before he was the dome man, he was here, losing.
The judges looked at the two trial panels — which both still survive, side by side, in a museum a few streets from here — and by one account admired them so equally that they proposed the two men share the job and work together. Brunelleschi's response to
