Giotto's Bell Tower

This guide to Giotto's Bell Tower in Florence follows the tower's unlikely design history: commissioned in 1334 from Giotto di Bondone, Florence's most celebrated painter, then in his sixties and untested as a builder. It traces his ambitious plan for a marble shaft ringed with sculpted reliefs of human progress, his death just three years in with only the base finished, and the Black Death that halted construction for years under his successor Andrea Pisano. A third architect, Francesco Talenti, eventually raised the tower's upper levels and cut the great windows that light the belfry today.