My wife and I spent the day walking down the cobblestone streets of Florence, Italy,  lined with block after block of restaurants, shops, and museums in the famous Renaissance architecture of faded-yellow buildings with red roofs. When, at the end of one block, we found the Accademia Gallery where we saw Michaelangelo’s statue of David which, in and of itself, was life changing.

With only an hour or two of daylight left on this February day, we turned yet another block to discover the magnificent Florence Cathedral. The cathedral is, by far, the largest building in the city. Climbing up to 75-375 feet tall in different places, 125 feet wide, and 502 feet long, it is the center around which the rest of Florence is built. It took 72 years to build the cathedral, starting in the late 13th century. Museum-worthy paintings don each doorway. Every single curve, corner, and crevice of the building has pink and green accents molded into it. There are twelve giant marble statues depicting the twelve apostles around the outside of the building, amazing works of art on their own, but are dwarfed by the glamor and extravagance of the rest of the edifice’s details. The cathedral is an incredible, indescribable, work of art down to every detail.

We rushed into the tour ticket box office to see what was still available for the day, and signed up for the 6:15pm dome tour. Italian cathedrals are known for having extravagantly painted dome ceilings, so we thought a tour to see the ceiling would be lovely.

We showed up at the entrance with other members in our tour around 6:10, and were ushered in at our scheduled time. We entered into a stone-walled hallway, not an intricately decorated and art-lining-the-walls decor that we expected of an Italian cathedral. We were then guided up two or three flights of stairs to a small room with some items on display from medieval times, like suits of armor and weapons. We thought, “Maybe this is a museum tour, or maybe we haven’t made it to the dome ceiling area of the cathedral yet.”

The group was then led into the next hallway, which was an even narrower stone staircase. There were no handrails, just the walls of stone. We could only fit two people’s width at a time up the stairs. And the stairs just kept going and going and going. Every couple stairwells, there would be a small hole in the stone wall, about 5 inches by 6 inches, where you could see our increasing height from the street below.

Our confusion grew as we continued on. I wasn’t sure if we had a tour guide anymore because the group was so split up from taking stairs at different speeds. The only thing we knew to do was to continue forward. The stairwells got even more narrow, so that only one person could fit through at once. The stairs seemed to be spiraling around and around the building – around the dome? We weren’t sure. At one point, we ran into someone trying to come back down the stairs, which made us unsure if we were even going in the right direction.

As we were climbing and questioning everything, a door appeared at the end of the dark, cold, damp, stone stairwell. The door opened, and we were standing on a balcony, face-to-face with the world-famous painting of The Last Judgement on the ceiling of the dome! We stood in wonder at the vibrantly colored heavenly scenes. We were told to remain silent because there was a service actively happening in the cathedral below, and we were quickly ushered toward the exit of the balcony. Having already gotten our money’s worth of views, I figured we would be descending back down the stairs from there.

Boy was I befuddled when the only way forward was up…

So, up we climbed several more flights of stone steps. Getting a few more views through holes in the wall that kept getting smaller, just as the people below shrank from view. We passed even more tourists climbing back down. Just as we were considering turning back, we arrived at a small, narrow, steel ladder that led to a small door to crouch through at the top. We thought, “This must finally be our destination!” We were so puzzled wondering where we were going, why people were going the opposite direction, having no guide, and slightly panicking, that we never even considered where the tour might be leading us! The small door opened up to the roof of the Cathedral of Florence – 375 feet in the air! We had climbed 37 flights of stairs, never knowing we were being led to the best view in all of Florence! By the time we made it to the top, the town was coated in the golden sunlight of dusk, heading into the sunset. After gathering our jaws up off the floor, we were able to walk all around the dome for 365-degree views of Florence. The architecture of the city was incredible, with the tan buildings and reddish-brown brick roofs as far as the eye could see, into the rolling hills of Tuscany. It was truly breathtaking. And how lucky that we happened to arrive there at sunset! I attached my phone to a spike in the rail using my phone grip and started a timelapse video. We then sat down by the railing and watched the sunset over Florence. Someone was playing an acoustic guitar and singing in the square below, which helped to set the magical mood. We were so moved by the view, music, and atmosphere, that we released some of Anna’s ashes there, at the most awe-inspiring view we’ve ever taken in. And it was all because of a happy accident.