Doors of Italy

Our friend Jimmy (he of Sitka Stairs fame), said upon hearing that we were going to Italy "take some photos of cool old wooden doors for me!" Little did he know, he was inventing a meme for our trip.

What stated as a joke ("hey, look a that cool old door") quickly became scavenger hunt for ever more interesting doors - the most dilapidated, the coolest ornamentation (with a side of cool door knockers), the biggest and the oldest. We thought we had found the oldest door at Santa Sabina (402CE) until we found the petrified door in Pompeii's Villa of the Mysteries (~79CE, though it's debatible whether that still counts as wood). The biggest by far were the old city gates of Florence.

There are three doors in this collection that are bronze, not wood. The doors of the Catherdral of Amalfi cast in Constantinople in 1066, Ghiberti's doors to the Baptistry in Florence which are quite literally considered to be the doorways to the Renaissance. The third is the relativly boring and door of the Siena Catherdal cast in 1946. All these are noted in the captions (a scavenger hunt for you).