When a man from Florence, Italy, is homesick, he says, "I am sick for the sight of the Dome."

He means the dome of the church of St. Mary of the Flower. It is one of the world's loveliest. Yet, for a long, long time, it seemed as if it would never exist.

The church itself was begun in 1296. In those days large construction projects were not hurried. So a hundred years later the church was still not completed, though much work had been done and the structure was considerably larger than had been originally planned.

The main thing left to be built was the dome, and no one knew how to build one large enough to fit the enlarged building. No one had built such a dome since Roman times. It remained for one man, Filippo Brunelleschi, to work out how it could be done. This book is the story of his discoveries in architecture, and his determined efforts that made the dome possible.

From the dust jacket