Boring History For Sleep By The Snoritorian
Oct 15, 2026 · 1 hr 43 min · 18 segments
Why a Single Night in a Medieval Brothel Would Finish You Off We are live on Spotify Listen here: https://open.spotify.com/show/0mfM0Csl7Ste2OUsWTD07j YouTube: / @Snoritorian Facebook: /…
The date is Thursday 30 August, in the year 1436.
And this is no ordinary Thursday.
This morning, after 16 years of labour, the last work on the great dome of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore was completed, and the dome was solemnly blessed.
All day the bells of the city have been ringing.
Trumpets and fifes have sounded from the rooftops.
Crowds have gathered in the squares to stare up at the vast red brick vault, the largest dome raised since antiquity, built without the great wooden framework that everyone had said would be needed, by a stubborn, brilliant, quarrelsome goldsmith named Filippo Brunelleschi.
Florentines counted their years from the Feast of the Annunciation, not from the 1st of January, which is the kind of detail that would confuse a visitor from almost anywhere else.
You arrive as the sun is going down behind the hills of Bellozgado, gilding the towers and rooftops in amber light.
Florence in 1436 is a city of perhaps 40,000 people, still not recovered from the Black Death and its many return visits, enclosed within a great circuit of walls, divided by the slow green river Arno and crossed by four bridges.
On the oldest of them, the Ponte Vecchio, the shops are not yet the goldsmith shops of later centuries.
They belong to butchers and tanners, and the smell, on a warm evening, is memorable.
the city is dominated by its merchants and bankers.
The most powerful man in Florence, though he holds no royal title and officially no office at all, is Cosimo de' Medici, banker to the Pope, who returned from a year of exile only two autumns ago and whose friends now quietly control the government.
The city's wealth rests on wool and silk cloth, on banking and on trade that stretches from London to Constantinople.
In workshops all over town, painters, sculptors and goldsmiths such as Donatello, Ghiberti and Fra Angelico are creating works that will be studied for centuries.
Only this year, the architect and scholar Leon Battista Alberti has written a treatise on painting in Italian and dedicated it to Brunelleschi.
and in a tangle of narrow alleys between the old market the mercato vecchio and the great octagonal baptistery of san giovanni stands the public brothel of the florentine republic on your way you pass the baptistery itself its striped marble walls glowing in the last of the light Its north doors, a masterpiece of gilded bronze by Lorenzo Ghiberti, were installed only 12 years ago, after more than two decades of work.
Ghiberti is now labouring on a second pair, for the east side, with panels of such astonishing depth and beauty that Michelangelo, a century later, will supposedly call them fit to be the gates of paradise.
Florentines stop to admire them every day.
Tonight, nobody is looking at doors.
You find it by following the noise.
The date is Thursday 30 August, in the year 1436.
And this is no ordinary Thursday.
This morning, after 16 years of labour, the last work on the great dome of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore was completed, and the dome was solemnly blessed.
All day the bells of the city have been ringing.
Trumpets and fifes have sounded from the rooftops.
Crowds have gathered in the squares to stare up at the vast red brick vault, the largest dome raised since antiquity, built without the great wooden framework that everyone had said would be needed, by a stubborn, brilliant, quarrelsome goldsmith named Filippo Brunelleschi.
Florentines counted their years from the Feast of the Annunciation, not from the 1st of January, which is the kind of detail that would confuse a visitor from almost anywhere else.
You arrive as the sun is going down behind the hills of Bellozgado, gilding the towers and rooftops in amber light.
Florence in 1436 is a city of perhaps 40,000 people, still not recovered from the Black Death and its many return visits, enclosed within a great circuit of walls, divided by the slow green river Arno and crossed by four bridges.
On the oldest of them, the Ponte Vecchio, the shops are not yet the goldsmith shops of later centuries.
They belong to butchers and tanners, and the smell, on a warm evening, is memorable.
the city is dominated by its merchants and bankers.
The most powerful man in Florence, though he holds no royal title and officially no office at all, is Cosimo de' Medici, banker to the Pope, who returned from a year of exile only two autumns ago and whose friends now quietly control the government.
The city's wealth rests on wool and silk cloth, on banking and on trade that stretches from London to Constantinople.
In workshops all over town, painters, sculptors and goldsmiths such as Donatello, Ghiberti and Fra Angelico are creating works that will be studied for centuries.
Only this year, the architect and scholar Leon Battista Alberti has written a treatise on painting in Italian and dedicated it to Brunelleschi.
and in a tangle of narrow alleys between the old market the mercato vecchio and the great octagonal baptistery of san giovanni stands the public brothel of the florentine republic on your way you pass the baptistery itself its striped marble walls glowing in the last of the light Its north doors, a masterpiece of gilded bronze by Lorenzo Ghiberti, were installed only 12 years ago, after more than two decades of work.
Ghiberti is now labouring on a second pair, for the east side, with panels of such astonishing depth and beauty that Michelangelo, a century later, will supposedly call them fit to be the gates of paradise.
Florentines stop to admire them every day.
Tonight, nobody is looking at doors.
You find it by following the noise.
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