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A civic temple
At least eight churches and towers were pulled down to make room
In 1388 the Consiglio Generale dei Seicento prepared a church to be a civic temple. To make room, most of one of the city's burgs was demolished, including at least eight churches and towers. The first stone was laid on 7 June 1390.
No dome
A cardinal sold the building materials, and the dome was never built
The third bay was built between 1441 and 1446, but Cardinal Baldassarre Cossa delayed it by selling the construction material and keeping the money. In 1514 a large dome was proposed. After two pillars and two pylons were built, the work was halted.
The front
The main front was started in 1538 and is still unfinished
The basilica is 132 metres long, 66 metres wide and 47 metres tall. Its façade was started in 1538 and remains unfinished. The main doorway was decorated by Jacopo della Quercia of Siena, with eighteen prophets on the archivolt.
132 mthe length of the basilica, with a front that is still unfinished
A coronation
An emperor was crowned in one of the side chapels in 1530
The nave has twenty-two side chapels. In the chapel of St. Abbondio, in the year 1530, Emperor Charles V was crowned by Pope Clement VII.
The line
A line in the floor measured the sun with a hole in the wall
In 1655 the astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini inlaid a meridian line in the left aisle. Sunlight through a small hole high in the wall falls on it at noon. With it Cassini made the first experimental verification of Kepler's laws of planetary motion.
66.8 mthe length of Cassini's meridian line
Day 1, morning
Next is Quadrilatero market streets.
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The words are a retelling of the Wikipedia article San Petronio, Bologna, and are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. They are checked against those articles, and a fact that is not in them is left out.