florence

Our attic in Florence has a wooden picture on the wall featuring fresh herbs. We have matching purple and yellow handtowels and facewashers. With our host in there as well, explaining the house rules (attic rules I guess) none of us can move. I shift my pack and knock another picture (Venice in the sunset) off the wall. The host shows me where the plastic crockery is. He says, I think you’ll be wanting this.

 

The cityscape of Florence is flecked with medieval towers of brick, and the modern city has been built in and around them like they’re rock. Each square reveals a huge church or baptistery or hall designed by Michelangelo or sculpted by Bernini or painted by Rafael. This is a city of famous artists, where unadorned walls are the exception rather than the rule.

We don’t see Michelangelo’s David. It’s a conscious decision and not one I regret in the least. I’m sure he’s a fine specimen, but there are statues spilling from windows here, growing from the pavement, bathing in the streets. We don’t want to deal with the exorbitant fees and the crowd-kung-fu. We take this policy a lot in Florence. We find quiet places in the city to be with great work. We take the cobbled streets less taken, if you will.

And why would we spend our time struggling to glimpse David when there's this guy, just standing atop a fountain and flanked by castles, with that take-no-crap expression on his stony face. He's no less than a masterpiece of attitude, in my opinion.

In the morning we do a walking tour. We certainly need it here. A middle-aged Renaissance academic gathers his eager flock around the obelisque beside Santa Maria Novella cathedral and then leads us through the city. We trail behind him in thin ribbons, avoiding mopeds and darting electric three-wheelers. He explains the mish-mash of architecture. The medieval towers stand shorter than they used to; their tops were knocked off by conquering armies in a kind of symbolic castration. Like, my building is bigger than yours. The Medici family, he says, funded basically everything grand in the city. We finish up at the  basilica di Santa Croce where the dry bones of Galileo Galilea lie beside beside Michelangelo's, and it’s past lunch time.

My favourite Italian picnic is mozzarella fresco e pomadoros, and while I think about Galileo’s discontented corpse I fold strips of the soft cheese around baby tomatoes. Everything in Italy is made from tomatoes and cheese as far as I can tell, and the consequence is they’ve kind of perfected the art of both.

Crowds flow past us and frown down at our pavement picnic. They concentrate in great clumps around the must-sees, which we always manage to populate at lunchtime. If there's a secret place backpackers go to eat their supermarket lunches we don't find it.

 

Near the heart of the city, a pretty bridge joins the banks of the Arno. Ponte Vecchio is lined either side with buildings like glued cereal boxes. Inside each, jewellery glitters and is reflected in the eyes of passers-by. There’s something about bridges that weren’t designed simply as a conveyer belt for traffic that is so gorgeous. It's nicknamed the Golden Bridge, but it's silver and sapphire and diamond sparkling too. I won’t deny that Ella and I spent the next hour carefully selecting a shortlist of engagement rings, an activity made far more enjoyable by the fact of its distance from our immediate future prospects. That’s the kind of thing that I find prettier from a distance. Like an impressionist painting. Or a wild tiger.

   

After a day in town we find ourselves sitting on a ledge outside Palazzo Vecchio, watching double doors across the street and eating pastries from Deanna Gluten Free (one for the bucket list). The doors of Florence’s old Odeon cinema open each evening and a few people drift inside for cheap tickets and a vintage cinema experience. The movies are shown in their original language and the velvet curtains hang to the floor. I feel underdressed. I feel part of the wrong era entirely. Private balconies line the left and right walls and behind us the stalls shade the back rows. The balconies are closed to the dozen or so people in the cinema. I’d say everyone besides us got in on a senior’s discount. It’s a place I’m surprised to find empty; they serve wine with the popcorn. I feel like it's some slumber-party secret Florence has let us in on for the evening.

A similar secret is reflected in the rustles and sighs of the Laurentian library, where we spend a morning inspecting ceilings and contemplating the outlines of intelligent tushes in the polished wood benches. The stairs to the reading room were designed by Michelangelo, but only tell your good friends because they're wondrously deserted.

In the evening, a public bus takes us up a winding mountain road outside the city to San Miniato al Monte, a moody, cavernous old church that wakes each morning to the perfect view over the city valley. Inside is cool. An organist and a singer practice Ave Maria. From the foundations a wide cemetery spreads like a stone skirt over the mountain.  The late afternoon sun gives the white and grey stone a kind of sweet sadness; it adds orange warmth to the cold stone chill of death I only remember when the wind blows. White angels watch us walk and cherubs smile. It’s not an unpleasant way to contemplate death, all things considered.

The doors of the church encourage guests to walk around the back for ‘monastic ice cream and cookies.’ I am struck with a beautiful vision in which robed monks chant prayers into their Sunbeam ice cream makers.

At six-thirty every night, chanting does rise from within the belly of the church. Monks sing Gregorian chants to the vaulted stone ceilings and it’s like something ancient, something from the dark ages or a fairy tale. I feel like an intruder. I guess I am. The monks ignore us and moan their mass, passing a chalice, sitting, kneeling, standing as one. I feel I’ve witnessed something sacred and forbidden, like a cult ceremony I’m now inextricably tied to. Their perfect disregard for our presence makes me feel like a child whose parents refuse to laugh at naughty jokes, like a discouragement.  

My mum told me I'd like Florence, that I couldn't miss it, but couldn't tell me exactly why or where to go or the things I should see. I know what she means, now I've been there. It'd be hard not to like it, with the art and the history and the modern-twist culture. I can't put my finger on exactly what Florence has to offer, but I would recommend it to anyone.