The interior of the Duomo is a very crowded place, the saints and the wealthy crowded against the walls and the altarpieces, the paintings, the pillars. The ceiling, they tell me, is actually painted, but looks carved either because of the artists’ talent or just the distance. The height of the place (from the inside even) is what hits you almost immediately, in a way that skyscrapers cannot. The arches look paper thin, the whole thing is an illusion or sketch just hanging in the air, and the only that has weight are the robes of the graceful statues.
The roof of the Duomo is a series of smooth staircases and hallways of spires. From a distance, and glimpsed through the chinks in the city from the streetcar windows, it seems a castle of insects, things that gather mud and dust and pile it onto itself to make a nest. It feels, from a distance, like netting, or a dirty white, or scaffolding that is pencil-thin and built up into pointed towers. From a distance, it is a dream and impossibility. Once on the rooftop, it is the center of the city. The population on the outside walls (sinners, scholars, saints, angels, holy pagans) has been thinned (relatively speaking) and is now a crowd of bishops, popes, Romans (I think soldiers), and wise men (and a woman or two). At the top of each tall thin tower on a small square stands a person, facing outward towards the city that surrounds it. Further down the tower are alcove-like things with pillars that seem to trap the enclosed figure—though none seem to be discomforted. These small enclosures surround that section of the spire, and sometimes there is a larger standing figure between each. The spire then continues on in a pattern at the very top, something almost Asian looking, flowery but sharp. And then after that the shape and design of the pillar-enclosures are repeated, though not the actual things. This is only one of the methods on which the people stand. But in any case, they stand everywhere, far enough away from the walkways to make it feel as if either you or they are floating.
The roof of the Duomo is a series of smooth staircases and hallways of spires. From a distance, and glimpsed through the chinks in the city from the streetcar windows, it seems a castle of insects, things that gather mud and dust and pile it onto itself to make a nest. It feels, from a distance, like netting, or a dirty white, or scaffolding that is pencil-thin and built up into pointed towers. From a distance, it is a dream and impossibility. Once on the rooftop, it is the center of the city. The population on the outside walls (sinners, scholars, saints, angels, holy pagans) has been thinned (relatively speaking) and is now a crowd of bishops, popes, Romans (I think soldiers), and wise men (and a woman or two). At the top of each tall thin tower on a small square stands a person, facing outward towards the city that surrounds it. Further down the tower are alcove-like things with pillars that seem to trap the enclosed figure—though none seem to be discomforted. These small enclosures surround that section of the spire, and sometimes there is a larger standing figure between each. The spire then continues on in a pattern at the very top, something almost Asian looking, flowery but sharp. And then after that the shape and design of the pillar-enclosures are repeated, though not the actual things. This is only one of the methods on which the people stand. But in any case, they stand everywhere, far enough away from the walkways to make it feel as if either you or they are floating.
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