Hello beautiful people, and welcome back on the route! 🙂
Today we are going to talk about the most iconic Italian landmarks…
“Agaaaaain?!!” you might be thinking – “everybody knows them already!”.
Yeah, it can be. Italian landmarks are famous worldwide and overly-photographed and talked about!
Also for us, as Italians ourselves, we lost count of how many times we’ve stood in front of an Italian monument (since elementary school trips forward!) and listened to a guide rattling off dates and dimensions.
We usually walked away remembering absolutely nothing… and personally I hated history back in school (luckily, I grew to love it trip after trip!).
Dates hardly ever stick without context….
But stories do!
So today, we will be digging into seven of Italy’s greatest monuments, from Milan to Florence, presenting you exactly the stuff that you won’t find written on any information panel!
And honestly? Buckle up, because some of what we found are genuinely mad! 😀
Let’s dive right in! 🙂
BONUS: If you enjoy fun facts, you’ll probably also like our 100 Interesting Fun Facts about Italy — but for now, let’s get into the monuments 🙂
1. The Milan Cathedral Has Been Under
Construction for Almost 600 Years!
And people complain about the Sagrada Famiglia taking over hundred years…
Did you know that the construction of Milan Cathedral started in 1386?
The front facade wasn’t finished until the 19th century, and the very last gate was installed in 1965!
That’s 579 years between the first stone and the last door.
And still… it still isn’t completely done!
The “Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo”, is a company that was founded in 1387 specifically to build and maintain the cathedral, and it is still operating today: still cutting marble, still replacing statues eaten by the Milanese smog!
And every single block placed on the building comes from one quarry: Candoglia, located in the Val d’Ossola.
As the story goes, in 1387 Duke Gian Galeazzo Visconti granted the Fabbrica exclusive rights to it, exempt from taxes, on condition the marble be used only for the cathedral.
That arrangement has never ended, nor even today!
Blocks still leave the quarry marked A.U.F. — Ad Usum Fabricae, “for the use of the Fabbrica.” 🙂
As we love Milan, you’re getting an extra fun fact on this one! 😉
At the top of the main spire of the Cathedral stands the “Madonnina”, a gilded copper statue of Mother Mary, placed there in 1774.
For a long time the city observed an unwritten rule — nothing in Milan should stand taller than her!
Then the Pirelli Tower went up in 1960 and beat her by a mile.
So Milan didn’t abandon the tradition, it just bolted a small replica of the Madonnina on top of the skyscraper.
And did it again with the ones that followed 😄🤣🤣
The rooftop terraces are the real experience here, walking among the spires rather than looking up at them.
You can book Milan Cathedral Tickets in advance, which we’d strongly recommend, because the summer queue is brutal. 🙂
Quick Tip: do the rooftop and the cathedral floor. Most people pick one and miss half of it! If you love taking photos, you’ll love it! 🙂
2. Rome’s Colosseum Could Empty
in Under 10 Minutes!
The Colosseum held between 50,000 and 80,000 spectators.
It had 80 numbered entrances, and every ticket — a pottery shard, not paper — told you which entrance, which staircase, which tier and which seat.
Result: the whole building could be evacuated in under ten minutes!
Modern stadium designers still study this, and plenty of contemporary arenas can’t match it!
Okok, we love Rome too, so here is another one!
The other marvel of the Colosseum was the velarium, a huge retractable awning that shaded the crowd during warm days.
This huge sail, was rigged from 240 wooden masts and operated by sailors from the imperial fleet at Misenum, near Naples — because nobody else in the empire could handle that much rope and canvas!
The Romans literally staffed their stadium sunshade with the navy!! 😎
And for the capital, one extra fun fact! 😀
Did you ever wonder why half of the Colosseum is missing today?
Most guides will tell you that an earthquake in 1349 brought down the southern outer wall.
Yes, that really happened.
But what they don’t tell you, it that most of the missing stone was taken!
For a thousand years the Colosseum was Rome’s most convenient quarry, and the travertine went into churches and palaces across the city, including, on papal orders, St. Peter’s Basilica!
If you’ve ever noticed those thousands of pockmarks on the surviving walls, those are holes left where medieval scavengers dug out the iron clamps holding the blocks together!
TIPS FOR VISITING THE COLOSSEUM
You can visit the underground hypogeum on certain routes, so check that when you book your Colosseum Rome Tickets — standard entry doesn’t include it.
If Rome is on your list, we’ve also written about 7 Hidden Gems in Rome Most Tourists Completely Miss and the 15 Roman dishes you need to try 🙂
3. Verona’s Roman Arena Has Hosted
Opera Every Summer Since 1913!
Everybody knows the Colosseum.
Almost nobody outside Italy knows that Verona has a Roman amphitheatre beautiful AS the Colosseum, that is still being used for its original purpose — putting on shows for thousands of people!
The Arena of Verona was in fact built around 30 AD, between the reigns of Augustus and Claudius.
In its day it was the third largest amphitheatre in the Roman world, after the Colosseum and the amphitheatre of Capua.
Then, in 1117, an exceptionally violent earthquake destroyed almost the entire outer ring.
Almost. Four arches survived, and the Veronese call that fragment l’Ala — “the wing.”
It’s still standing there today, a lone slice of the original outer wall, and it’s the first thing we point at whenever we take friends to Verona after passing the balcon of Romeo and Juliet 🙂
Despite that, the Arena remains one of the best-preserved Roman amphitheatres on Earth!
Now the good part…
On 10 August 1913, the Veronese tenor Giovanni Zenatello and impresario Ottone Rovato staged a performance of Verdi’s Aida inside the Arena to mark the centenary of the composer’s birth.
It was meant to be a one-off. It became an institution!
The Arena di Verona Opera Festival has run every summer since, which means this two-thousand-year-old Roman building has been an active opera venue for over a century.
Quick Tip: the cheap seats are the stone steps, and they are stone. Locals bring a cushion, and you can rent one at the entrance. Do it. Three hours of Verdi on bare Roman rock is a different kind of cultural experience 😅
4. The Tower of Pisa Started Leaning
Before They Finished the Third Floor!
Here’s the thing most people get wrong about Pisa: the lean was never a later problem xD
Construction began in 1173. By the late 1170s, with only three of the eight planned storeys built, the tower was already tilting.
The cause was gloriously simple (and stupid too!).
The ground underneath is soft, unstable soil, and the foundations settled unevenly almost immediately.
What happened next is the genuinely curious bit…
Construction stopped for around a century, largely because Pisa kept going to war.
That pause is probably the only reason the tower still exists… the soil had time to compress and settle. Build it straight through and it would almost certainly have collapsed! 🙂
When work resumed, the builders tried to correct the tilt by making the upper floors slightly taller on the sinking side, which is why the tower isn’t just leaning, it’s very subtly banana-shaped 😉
Then, by the 20th century the lean had become dangerous.
A major stabilisation project ran from 1990 to 2001: engineers siphoned soil out from underneath the higher side, letting the tower settle slightly back.
They reduced the overhang by about 44 centimetres (not much for us, but a lot for a stoney-leaning tower!) and handed the tower back to the city on 16 June 2001.
They deliberately did not straighten it.
A vertical Pisa tower would be an architectural nobody 😉
5. You Can’t Photograph the Sistine Chapel
Because of… a Japanese TV Network!
Everyone assumes the photo ban in the Sistine Chapel, like pretty much everywhere else, is about flash damaging the frescoes.
Well…It isn’t!
It’s all about a weird contract!
Let me explain…
By the 1980s the ceiling of the chapel was filthy as hell (curious for a church eheh).
Centuries of candle soot slowly turned Michelangelo’s colours muddy brown.
The Vatican approved a restoration in 1980, then discovered it couldn’t afford it, and went looking for a sponsor!
The Nippon Television Network Corporation won the bid, starting around $3 million and eventually climbing to roughly $4.2 million.
In exchange, NTV received exclusive photographic and video rights to the restored frescoes.
Hence the ban… for commercial exclusivity!
Those rights though, were not permanent but for merely 15 years, which actually lapsed decades ago: the “Last Judgment” came out of copyright in 1997!
The rule nevertheless stayed, partly because it keeps thousands of daily visitors moving instead of stopping for selfies, and makes the visit more efficient for everyone!
When visiting, you will likely hear guards shouting “No photo! Silenzio!” roughly every ninety seconds. It’s part of the experience now, quiet funny honestly 😅
Said that, while we’re here, let’s kill the other Sistine myth…
Michelangelo did not paint lying on his back!
He stood up, on scaffolding he designed himself, bracketed into the walls so the chapel could stay in use below.
Head tilted back, arms above him, awful for the neck, but upright the whole time!
The lying-down image comes largely from the 1965 Holliwood film “The Agony and the Ecstasy” which invented a fact that stuck for sixty years!
Quick Tip: Sistine Chapel Tickets sell out constantly, so book ahead and take the first slot of the day!
6. Piazza San Marco Is the Only
“Piazza” in All of Venice!
This is our favourite bit of Venetian pedantry, and it is completely true!
Venice has hundreds of squares (which in Italy would translate as “Piazze”).
But exactly only one of them is called “piazza” in Venice.
Every other square in the city is called “campo”, or literally “field” in Italian, because that is what they originally were: open grassy spaces, often with a well in the middle, used for grazing and growing vegetables before they were paved.
Only St Mark’s earned the title piazza, because it was the political and religious heart of the Republic.
Even today, calling any other Venetian square a “piazza” will get you gently corrected by a local.
As we are here…let’s talk about the Basilica too!
Long story short: it exists because of a heist!
Wait…what?
As the story goes, in 828 AD, two Venetian merchants named Tribunus and Rusticus stole the body of Saint Mark from his tomb in Alexandria, Egypt.
To get it past the guards at the port, they hid the relics in a barrel and covered them with layers of pork, correctly betting that the Muslim inspectors wouldn’t want to rummage through it.
And it worked!
The saint arrived in Venice, the basilica was built to house him, and the city adopted his winged lion as its symbol — which is why you’ll see that lion on absolutely everything in the Veneto region today!
And last but not least…
The west end of the square, incidentally, is called the “Ala Napoleonica”, as it was rebuilt by Napoleon around 1810 after he demolished a church to make space.
Venetians have not entirely forgiven him on this…
If you want to know more, we’ve got a whole article right on curiosities about Venice, you can check it out here: 7 Curiosities about Venice that will Make you go WOW!
7. Florence’s Dome Was Built
Without Any Scaffolding
Did you know that the dome of Florence was not planned in advance? Or at least the roof was not!
Florence began its cathedral with a spectacular act of confidence: they designed a hole in the roof far bigger than anyone knew how to cover, and started building anyway! (personally I love this attitude: just start, things will come along the way! 😉 ).
And then…the octagonal opening sat there for decades.
Nobody had a workable plan! xD
Then after decades of research, Filippo Brunelleschi finally won the commission, and between 1420 and 1436 he did something that still makes engineers crazy today…
He built it without wooden centering!
What it means? That it is “empty” inside, there is nothing holding the roof outwards, just it’s crazily thought-out shape!
Every dome until then had been raised over a temporary timber framework. For a span this size, no such framework could exist: there wasn’t enough timber in Tuscany, and it would have collapsed under its own weight anyway!
So Brunelleschi designed a dome that supported itself as it rose!
His key trick was laying the bricks in a herringbone pattern, which locked each course into the one below so the bricks couldn’t slide off the increasingly steep curve.
And he also built it as “two shells”, one inside the other, thus cutting the weight dramatically!
I remember I first studied the architecture behind this Basilica during an art history class in middle school (for your knowledge, in Italy “Art History” is a very important subject!) and then we visited Florence with my class for 5 days.
The size and numbers of it, are ridiculous, even more when you see it first person:
- Over 4 million bricks!
- Weighing more than 25,000 tons!
- External diameter around 55 metres!
- And it remains, six centuries later, the largest masonry dome in the world
Nobody has built a bigger one out of brick and stone since, and it is just sooo massive! You can basically see it everywhere in Florence, and even from out town!
Brunelleschi kept his methods deliberately secret, and the hoisting machines he invented to haul stone up there were so far ahead of their time that Leonardo da Vinci later sketched them just to work out how they functioned!
If Florence is on your route, our 10 Fun Facts About Florence’s Wine Culture might nicely with a day of climbing domes 😉
Conclusions 🙂
And here we are at the end of this article! 🙂
What struck us most while researching the fun facts to build this curious post, is how much of it comes down to people making stubborn, human decisions!
From the duke handing over a quarry tax-free in 1387 (and nobody ever revoking it!), to a city bolting copies of a Madonnina statua onto skyscrapers and the two merchants hiding a saint under pork… marvels come often out of thin air and human imagination!
Monuments aren’t frozen objects.
They become “monuments” because they aggregate “moments” of history: they are the accumulated result of centuries of arguments, accidents and workarounds, and most of them are still going! 🙂
Before you go, we would like to ask you:
- Which of these seven curiosities surprised you the most?
- Have you ever been up on the Duomo’s rooftop terraces, or climbed Brunelleschi’s dome?
- Did you get shouted at in the Sistine Chapel too? XDD
Let us know in the comments below! 😀
Here are a few other Italy articles you might enjoy:
100 Interesting Fun Facts about Italy
40 Essential Italy Travel Tips (from an Italian!)
10-Days Itinerary to Travel Italy like a Local | Free Download
7 Hidden Gems in Rome Most Tourists Completely Miss
7 Curiosities about Venice that will Make you go WOW!
Rome Foods: 15 Mouth-Watering Roman Dishes you Need to Try!
All Types of Italian Coffees – How to Order a Coffee in Italy
Thank you for reading, and see you in the next article! 🙂
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