Baptistery of San Giovanni

Address Piazza del Duomo, 50122 Florence
Admission Combined ticket with Duomo complex €20
Opening Hours Mon–Sat 08:15–23:00; Sun 08:15–20:00 (hours vary — check ahead)

Florence's octagonal baptistery, dedicated to John the Baptist (patron of the city), is older than the cathedral it faces. The interior is covered in Byzantine-style mosaics on a vast scale — some ten million tesserae covering the ceiling with a Last Judgment, paradise, hell, and biblical scenes completed between 1240 and 1300. The effect, looking up into the dome, is overwhelming.

The exterior bronze doors are equally extraordinary. The east doors — Ghiberti's "Gates of Paradise," completed 1447 — depict ten Old Testament scenes in gold relief, each a masterpiece of Renaissance perspective and naturalism. The originals are in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo; the doors on the building are replicas, but well worth studying in detail. The competition panels for the north doors commission (1401) — submitted by Ghiberti and Brunelleschi — are often cited as the moment Renaissance art was born.

things to do sight church architecture centro storico
A story
Dante Alighieri was baptized here and wrote in the Paradiso of his longing to return "as poet and put on, at my baptismal font, the laurel crown" — a wish never fulfilled. He died in exile in Ravenna in 1321. The east doors, which Michelangelo called "so beautiful that they might fittingly stand at the gates of Paradise," gave the name by which they are now universally known.