By Shelby Olson
Throughout my time in Florence, I was not only able to discover the nooks and crannies of the city but make new and at times peculiar discoveries about the large, main monuments everybody knows and loves. I entered what I would call the “tourist phase” and saw anything and everything there was to see but reminiscing on my stay in Florence, I really didn’t know a lot about the places I was visiting. For example, did you know a ball-shaped decoration fell off the Duomo and there is now a marble slab to commemorate it? Me neither.
In January of 1601, Florence experienced a thunderstorm and lightning struck the golden sphere on top of the Dome’s lantern, causing it to detach and land right next to the church. To this day, there is a circular marble slab to signify where the ball landed when it fell off. The sphere, commissioned to Verrocchio in 1468, was made of bronze and weighed almost 2000 kilos (approx. 4409 lbs). Andrea del Verrocchio, it should be mentioned, ended up inheriting the Duomo’s architectural project after Brunelleschi’s death in 1446. The weight itself can show the large impact this ball had upon touchdown. Prior to falling off in 1601 and definitely restored in 1602, the ball had proved be unruly on other occasions – electricity-related problems due to thunderstorms had already been documented at least twice in the 1500s.
Turns out I was not the only one who didn’t know about this “fallen ball.” I decided to visit the Duomo to see the marble slab itself and watch if anybody else would notice it. During my hour of sitting there, not a single person stopped to look at it or take a picture. Rather, I was getting weird looks for taking a picture of this random circle on the ground. This taught me that when you are visiting an important monument, there is so much more to see than its beauty and you should learn everything you can beforehand.
Next time you are visiting the Duomo or simply walking past it, make sure to venture to the back side of the Duomo to check out this marble slab. It may just be a circle on the ground but it holds much significance and you may be one of the few that knows about it. If you learned one thing from this, remember to research the places you are visiting beforehand because you may learn something the tour guide doesn’t tell you.
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