Siena 2018: Outside the Cathedral

The Siena Cathedral is conveniently only about 500 feet (152 meters) from Il Campo and although the cathedral is at the top of the hill that Siena was built on it’s an easy climb to get up there. Similar to the Florence Cathedral, the outside of the Siena Cathedral has a combination of white, green, and pink marble to make decorative stripe patterns in the stonework. The cathedral was finished around 1264 but in the 1300s work began on a massive expansion that would have created a new nave. Had this expansion been finished it would have more than doubled the church’s size and made it one of the largest churches on the planet. Unfortunately for Siena, the Black Death hit the city hard in 1348 and within a few years construction was permanently halted. On the cathedral’s southeast side you can see the remains of the unfinished expansion. A museum is now housed within that part of the church and we would pay it a visit later in the day after we went inside the cathedral.