Christmas In Florence

 

 

A few years ago, Bob, who now lives in Italy (and wrote about his new home and how they love American Christmas songs) spent Christmas with his family in Florence. This is what he did and where he went, and why it really was the most magical time of year…

 

 

 

 

After five days in Florence, we have begun to make the rounds. Three mornings straight now we’ve breakfasted at the Mercato Centrale, a food emporium extravaganza inside a structure that reminds me of the long-gone, much-missed original Penn Station in New York City. 

 

We saw the infinitely spellbinding David that Michaelangelo chiseled out of marble with his own hands. We strolled through the vastly airy Duomo itself, after briefly befriending visitors from Utah on the line. We dined at Gusto Leo on chicken cacciatore, potato ravioli, chicken cutlets, a carafe of white wine, plus prosecco to start and lemoncello on the house to finish. My granddaughter Lucia, 15 months old, sampled bread, beans and gorgonzola sauce. 

 

 

 

 

We crossed the Ponte Vecchio, each little enclosed shop with a window overlooking the Arno. We ambled at night along the more fashionable streets, all brilliant with Christmas lights, lights dangling down like rainfall or strung across the street in rivulets – Christmas lights everywhere you looked under the Florentine sky. 

 

Beauty here is ever-present — beautiful signs, beautiful window displays, beautiful merchandise, beautiful clothing, beautiful buildings, beautiful people, and a giant igloo made of lights that you could walk through. Beauty everywhere! Florence is so spectacular that more than once you suspect it’s artificial, a reproduction staged by Disney — Renaissanceland — complete with animatronic figures modeled after Michaelangelo, da Vinci and the Medicis, a simulacrum. 

 

The Via del Proconsolo was almost a magic trick. We saw the statue of Dante and I told my wife Elvira that I had more than once tried reading The Divine Comedy and found it such rough going I had to stop after just a few pages, only for her to tell me that comprehension and appreciation of the masterwork depends on the quality of the translation. 

 

We saw one shop devoted to anything involving truffles, all oils and whatnot. The top of the Baptistry looked, at least to me, much like the top of a skyscraper. We dined one night on sushi at Da Kou. We passed the Medici chapel, surprisingly plain architecturally, perhaps an act of modesty in the context of fabulous wealth. We crossed the Piazza del Duomo and the Piazza della Signoria and the Palazzo Vecchio and the soaring Campanile bell tower and the Baptistry with an exterior that looks more like an interior, as if the building were somehow turned inside out, so white, so surprisingly pale, in contrast to the usual brown and gray facades seen on churches and such. 

 

Florence, all in all, is as lovely a city as I will ever see. Florence is history kept alive, preserved meticulously and lovingly and reverently, a history as majestic as any other in all of Western civilization, emblematic of an artistic flowering such as the world is unlikely to know again. Enrico, the driver who brought me to the city from the airport in Pisa, himself a native Florentine, told me how Florence has changed in his lifetime, how over the last 30 years or so it became more commercial, how he is resigned to accepting this. And I observed that just as someone had to finance the Renaissance, so must others pay for the Florence of today. 

 

And yes, so much of Florence feels to me like an outdoor mall. The shopping is often exquisite, and only occasionally tacky and touristy. The shops offer handsome facades, the merchandise displayed ever so neatly, the merchants ever so courtly and obliging. At its best, Florence is nothing less – make no mistake – than a giant, open museum under the sky. 

 

Oh, yes, we also hit an actual mall, the Gigli, a fine mall as malls go, but taxing after two-and-a-half hours. Cognitive dissonance personified. But then I came to Florence for something other than Florence itself. I came to Florence for my family. 

 

 

 

A few random notes about Florence . . . How Enrico, the driver, knew so much about its history that I told him he should be a professor. He told me he acted as a tour guide. How Florence ingeniously keeps its garbage stashed underground and out of sight. In my first few days in the city, as we walked around the historic center, admiring all the Christmas lights ablaze and the shops, store after store, stall after stall, selling something either explicitly or vaguely Florentine – shoes, handbags, scarves, belts, wallets, dresses, suits. To me it was equally intoxicating and off-putting, all this mercantile activity. 

 

But hey, business is business. If someone has to finance all the historic preservation and renovation that has to go on here, if it has to be Burberry or Chanel or Giorgio Armani, so be it. 

 

How well I could have managed without hearing the late-night antics and revelry in the piazza just below our windows. One morning someone at 4 a.m. was belting out “Figaro.” I wish happiness to all – truly I do – but never if it comes at the expense of my sleep. Every night, in the wee hours, someone carried on and created a commotion, either speaking loudly or screaming and issuing other guttural noises – maybe students, certainly tourists, almost always young men, nocturnal hooligans doing no real harm other than disturbing the peace, my sleep.

 

How the church bells sounded gonging and tolling, so choirlike and melodic . . . How I all but swooned strolling through the Mercato Centrale, all the Italian specialty foods on lavish display . . . How the stone in the streets came from volcanoes . . . Florence is such a low slung city, the churches the tallest structures, towering over everything, so few buildings even remotely modern. How history is allowed to peek through in a restaurant with the original stone left uncovered.

 

And yesterday a certain idea came to me. As one considers Florence, one is forced to contemplate what happened here. The Renaissance happened here. Yes, here in Florence and nowhere else, neither Rome nor Milan nor Venice. Most likely the greatest flowering of artistic expression and genius history has ever known. I could feel that history pulsing through my bloodstream. For the beauty that came out of the Renaissance has informed and influenced and even governed our lives for more than half a millennia now. 

 

From the tourists I sense only the dimmest, if any, reverence for the hallowed history here, most too busy eating and drinking and shopping and taking selfies in front of landmarks to contemplate the miracle of the Renaissance. 

 

Raising the question, “Shall we simply kill all the tourists?” (Or, maybe more reasonably, require tourists to take a pledge or a test attesting to at least a marginal awareness of where they are?)

 

My top takeaways from my visit to Florence so far are as follows. First, bringing up a baby is the hardest job on earth, and also the most rewarding. Second, my stay in Florence has turned out to be, as planned, expected and hoped, highly domestic. All of us homebodies hung out in our apartment, eating together, watching movies together, keeping an eye on Lucia together, occasionally venturing out to walk together and shop together. All in all, my visit was a profile in togetherness. The only sights I really wanted to see were Elvira, Caroline, Lucia and my son-in-law Vito. 

 

Third, the rented apartment where we stayed, located about as centrally as possible, surpassed expectations, more home than hotel, among the most spacious, handsome, elegant places I’ve ever seen. Fourth, Florence is as beautiful as advertised, maybe even more so, and I take a backseat to no one in my reverence for its artistic legacy — it runs deep -– but I’d really rather see it without any tourists around. Fifth, if Italians have a signature characteristic, at least as far as I’m concerned, based on my (to then) six visits to Italy, it’s obliviousness — obliviousness about themselves but also to others, whether as pedestrians, motorists, sightseers, restaurant-goers or otherwise. Rarely do they look you in the eye. Sixth, I admire architecture and sculpture more than I do painting – they speak to me more, maybe because they’re three-dimensional. 

 

Every morning in Florence I made myself cappuccino and looked out the windows at this spectacular city waking up, and waited for Caroline to arrive, wearing Lucia on her hip.