to do the work.  In a little while, however, one’s eyes not only become accustomed to the twilight but are very grateful for it; and beginning to look inquiringly about, as they ever do in this city of beauty, they observe, just inside, an instant reminder of the antiseptic qualities of Italy.  For by the first great pillar stands a receptacle for holy water, with a pretty and charming angelic figure upon it, which from its air of newness you would think was a recent gift to the cathedral by a grateful Florentine.  It is six hundred years old and perhaps was designed by Giotto himself.

The emptiness of the Duomo is another of its charms.  Nothing is allowed to impair the vista as you stand by the western entrance:  the floor has no chairs; the great columns rise from it in the gloom as if they, too, were rooted.  The walls, too, are bare, save for a few tablets.

The history of the building is briefly this.  The first cathedral of Florence was the Baptistery, and S. John the Baptist is still the patron saint of the city.  Then in 1182 the cathedral was transferred to S. Reparata, which stood on part of the site of the Duomo, and in 1294 the decision to rebuild S. Reparata magnificently was arrived at, and Arnolfo di Cambio was instructed to draw up plans.  Arnolfo, whom we see not only on a tablet in the left aisle, in relief, with his plan, but also more than life size, seated beside Brunelleschi on the Palazzo de’ Canonici on the south side of the cathedral, facing the door, was then sixty-two and an architect of great reputation.  Born in 1232, he had studied under Niccolo Pisano, the sculptor of the famous pulpit at Pisa (now in the museum there), of that in the cathedral in Siena, and of the fountain at Perugia (in all of which Arnolfo probably helped), and the designer of many buildings all over Italy.  Arnolfo’s own unaided sculpture may be seen at its best in the ciborium in S. Paolo Fuori le Mura in Rome; but it is chiefly as an architect that he is now known.  He had already given Florence her extended walls and some of her most beautiful buildings—­the Or San Michele and the Badia—­and simultaneously he designed S. Croce and the Palazzo Vecchio.  Vasari has it that Arnolfo was assisted on the Duomo by Cimabue; but that is doubtful.

The foundations were consecrated in 1296 and the first stone laid on September 8th, 1298, and no one was more interested in its early progress than a young, grave lawyer who used to sit on a stone seat on the south side and watch the builders, little thinking how soon he was to be driven from Florence for ever.  This seat—­the Sasso di Dante—­was still to be seen when Wordsworth visited Florence in 1837, for he wrote a sonnet in which he tells us that he in reverence sate there too, “and, for a moment, filled that empty Throne”.  But one can do so no longer, for the place which it occupied has been built over and only a slab in the wall with an inscription (on the house next the Palazzo de’ Canonici) marks the site.