Piazza del Duomo in "Inferno by Dan Brown"

I am in the midst of reading "Inferno" by Dan Brown. In Chapter 53, his adventures reached the Piazza del Duomo. I recalled the photos I took when I was there in May. What struck me was how little I knew from the trip compared to what was written in the book. Trips nowadays are just the "Been There, Seen That" kind of affair. The Piazza had 3 main structures. The Giotto Bell Tower (tall building on the right) described in the book as 300 ft tall with more than 20,000 pounds of bells in the belfry. The Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore (middle building including the red dome) had a ceiling fresco The Last Judgement and the dome was the biggest at that time. The octagonal building (to the left) was the Florence Baptistery where in the novel the Dante's Death Mask had been hidden; that Robert Langdon was searching Venice for.

All I saw during the trip were the exterior facades; no doubt very beautiful, but how much did I missed?

The main feature at the Baptistery was the East Doors (bronze doors) with the ten panels by Lorenzo Ghiberti. The doors took him 27 years to complete. It was said that Michelangelo commented they were so good they should be the Gates to Paradise. I did take some photos of the panels. As pointed out in the novel, the doors were actually a copy put up in 1990 so that the original doors could be treated for preservation. In the novel, the inside of the Baptistry was described in detail. Again I missed a lot; the ceiling had scenes from the Bible, constructed from small mosaic tiles, depicting Heaven and Hell.