Florence Came to Life

As a traveller, one can walk through city after city.  Some have wide modern streets with leveled sidewalks--easy on the feet.  Others have dirt roads and a sense of an untamed life.  In these, my mind is comforted by the fact that humans have not tainted this corner of the world with industry.  Then, there are the quaint cobblestone streets overflowing with charm and limited by an ever growing population of pedestrians, bicycles and cars.  After years of traveling that initial sense of wonderment begins to wear off as one steps off the train into a brand new city.  It does not seem brand new; it seems familiar, and yet how can that be?  You have never been there.  In these moments I wonder if my spoil of experience has stifled my appreciation.  Have I outgrown traveling? Has my desire for this long-time passion waned?

There is nothing like history to renew a passion for travel.  Buildings can be charming, the scent of waffles irresistible, the clanking of church bells magical, but without history it is lifeless.  Why does that eloquent palace stand there?  Are the waffles native to this town's palate? To whom does the story of the church's bells belong?  Just as you and I may have like interests or jobs or evens faces, our personal histories make us different and such is the case of a city.

A few weeks ago, I was privileged to take a city tour with the administrative assistant at my school who is also a licensed tour guide of Florence.  I had been wandering the streets of Florence for several weeks at this time.  I already discovered Perche No?, a gelateria with decadent straccetella ice cream.  I found the famous two fifty euro sandwiches at the counter top shop owned by a couple of brothers.  I knew that around 9 PM the cobblestone streets of Florence empty, and the street musicians in Piazza Signoria strum familiar melodies that only echo so sweetly in the square's silence.  I knew that the shadows of the statues in front of the Uffizi emphasize their movement in a way that brings to life these marble ghosts.  Beauty and charm, tastes and smells had revealed themselves to me, but I wandered through these magnificent streets awaiting the magic.

On Sunday, Florence came to life.  We began in Piazza Republica, home of the forum in the days of Rome.  I was standing over old Roman Baths.  My mind plummeted below the cobblestones to this city beneath me.  What conversations were had here 2000 years ago?  What business deals were had?  Had any of these decisions affected the present world that I belong to?  Traveling toward the surface to the nineteenth century, Florence was a neoclassical city.  Today, we see evidence in the thin structures squeezed between much grander buildings.  These are the casatores or homes of bankers and merchants who wished to live within the safety of the city walls.  What happened to those that could not afford such safety?  What must it have been like to live in such a loosely structured world lacking unity and order?  And yet, does such division still exist?  I think back to my life in Los Angeles and to my students who shared moments of their lives of bullets piercing through their windows when curiosity got the better of them and they dared to look out the window at an inopportune moment.  Here, order and laws seem to be disregarded as well.  I wonder if they long for the invisible walls of suburbia.  Would not they like to live in a banker's casatore?

Returning to the modern cobblestone streets, we walk to a neighboring piazza, Piazza delga Strozzi.  Its landmark is a white stone palace built in the Renaissance style with large protruding stones at the bottom that flatten as you look toward the sky.  The facade is symmetrical  and ornate but the sides create our saying "cutting corners" as the Strozzi family strived to save some money.  Life is born in this building with the painting of the fourteenth and fifteenth century women.  These elite women whitened their skin with arsenic powder, bleached their hair with horse urine and created a receding hairline all to conform to the social expectations of their aristocratic status.  The door of the palace opens and I expect one of these women to emerge.  I am ready to compare notes.  What women do in the name of appearance.  A long held tradition which only evolves with its methods of pain...

To be continued