Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
Per Amore di Dio
"I eat a hot grape from the market and the violet sweetness breaks open in my mouth. It even smells purple. I wish I could stay longer but the bells of Campanile remind me of time. 'Ding-dang-dong,' the bell says, instead of 'ding-dong'." - Under the Tuscan Sun
"To come to Italy," Marcello had preached over dinner one night in Rome, "and not go to Florence - this is a very bad thing. It goes against everything that is good and right.... It is like going against God."
"In English we would say it's 'sacrilegious'," I offered, sipping my wine.
"Yes!" Marcello understood and approved vehemently of the description. "To do this is sacrilegious!" And he wasn't the first to tell me so.
So here I am in Florence, and honestly I'm wondering why I didn't come sooner.
Wednesday morning I took a quick cappuccino and cornetto at the bar next to my guesthouse, a cheap non-touristy spot that was always open early and packed with locals, then went back upstairs to wash my face and get myself organized for the trip to Florence. While my roommates were still asleep, I cleared out my things, made my bed, lugged my suitcase step-by-step down the steep, hay-loft-style staircase (if I could do this, I really could do anything), left my keys on the kitchen table and ghosted out, leaving no evidence that I was ever there at all.
Watching a film reel of Italian countryside slide by outside the train window, I began to feel myself decompress. Open space. Sheep grazing on green hills. The classical greyscale of the city, while beautiful in a black-and-white-movie kind of way, had been suffocating. Now, looking out at the clear expanse of impossibly blue sky, unobstructed by villas and stone monuments, only one word came to mind: air. I felt my soul heave a sigh of relief, releasing a breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding.
Florence is windy and colder than Rome, as it's higher up in the hills of Tuscany. It's also infinitely cleaner, smaller (all of the sites are easily walkable; no need for the bus or Metro whatsoever) and more peaceful. Not to mention cheaper. Arriving here, famished from the train ride North, I immediately found a cafe just down the street from where I was staying. I had risotto with in-season artichokes and pancetta, a basket of homemade Florentine (saltless) bread and a glass of house wine all for €4.50, about half the price of a cocktail in Rome. After that I stopped in the street market just outside and picked up a huge cluster of gorgeous black grapes for later (maybe I was missing Mario). €1. Welcome to Tuscany.
Food wasn't the only thing that was less expensive. My guesthouse, which was located just outside the city centre, was a thousand times nicer than my studio apartment by the Pantheon and less than half the price. My room was big and bright and clean. I had my own TV and writing desk. The bed was blue with a fluffy yellow comforter. When I asked if there was a way to make it warmer in my room, my host - a friendly, accommodating woman named Eleonora - laughed, as though the notion that there wasn't would be utterly ridiculous. "Of course! There's a thermostat next to the kitchen doorway. Just press 'on'." Of course. I'd gone from sleeping on a mattress on the floor in a lightless, heatless, dirty hole in the wall to literally having a chandelier in my bedroom.
And I had a shower. A real shower big enough to turn a full 360 degrees in, with hot water that seemed to never run out. My first time using it I let myself linger. I knew water in Italy was expensive but I thought, just this once, I deserved to relax and enjoy. I enjoyed it so much the neighbours might have thought someone was having sex in the next apartment. And for the first time in over a week, I got out feeling clean.
Climbing under the big, fluffy yellow comforter, I was struck by a quiet that suddenly seemed foreign to me, the only sound the whisper of the wind outside my window. Gone was the interminable racket of the city. You could hear the wind here at night. It got dark here at night. It occurred to me that by going to Rome first, I had thrown myself to the dogs. As much as I'd come to know and love the city, Florence was a markedly gentler place, and much easier to get to know. Even before my first full day here, I'd walked right into the city centre, all the way to the Arno River and back. It was bright and embracing, a sunflower to Rome's vibrant, thorny rose. Author Dan Brown once described Rome as "life out of balance", and with all its decadence and richness and Romanesque excess, I had to agree. Tuscany was balance reinstated. If Rome was the passionate, lascivious lovemaking, then Florence was the cuddling afterwards.
If you're worried about missing landmarks in Florence, don't. Except maybe Ponte Vecchio. I was halfway across the Arno before I realized I was on the damn bridge, canopied by the famed Vasari corridor, an enclosed passageway that connects Palazzo Vecchio with Palazzo Pitti. For the most part though, monuments in Florence are, let's say, less than subtle. I was walking along Via Gino Capponi yesterday, eyes on map, looking for Piazza Della Liberta (it was behind me), when suddenly I found myself in the goliath, domed shadow of Il Duomo, or the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore. Looking slowly up to its peak the way a kindergartener raises his gaze from a bully's crotch to his face, silhouetted in the sun, I felt the wind knocked out of me. "Per amore di Dio," I whispered, meaning the words literally.
Ornately hand-carved and coloured, the Florence Cathedral is even more monumental, and illustrates even better man's sanctification of worship than the Sistine Chapel and the Pantheon put together. I blinked in the sunlight, doing my best to believe I wasn't looking at an IMAX screen, but honest-to-God (pun intended) real life.
I returned to Piazza Duomo again this morning on my way to the San Lorenzo street market and the sight was no less awe-inspiring the second time around. I have a feeling that, as with the Coliseum, it's something that just doesn't get old (that one was accidental). I was bent over backwards, trying to fit the massive dome in the camera frame on my iPad, when nine o'clock struck.
If you've never heard the bells of Giotto's Campanile, the free-standing, 85-metre gothic bell tower adjacent the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore, it can have a rather apocryphal effect. You won't just hear it, you'll feel it, down to the marrow in your bones, and for the minute or so that the bells are chiming, big bells and little bells, baritones and sopranos, a whole choir of bells, you might think the world is coming to an end. I'd heard plenty of cathedral bells in Rome, all of which were indescribably beautiful and made me smile and stop and listen every time, but these were different. These were beautiful and terrifying. These were sublime.
Doing my research later, I learned Giotto's Campanile actually has seven bells (hearing them you would think there were hundreds), and each has its own name. There's Campanone, literally "biggest bell", cast in 1705 by Antonio Petri of Florence. She weighs 5385 kilograms, is 2 metres in diameter and 2.10 metres in height. Then there is La Misericordia, the "mercy bell", dating to 1830 and weighing almost 2100 kilograms. Following these there are Apostolica (1200 kilograms), Annunziata (856 kilograms), Mater Dei ("God's Mother bell" - 481 kilograms) L'Assunta (339 kilograms) and L'Immacolata (237 kilograms). After that I made a point of memorizing their names and hearing them sing every morning.
A short walk down another via to Piazza San Lorenzo I found the daily street market, famed for its leather goods, clothing and accessories, and adjacent to it the Mercato Centrale, the local food market, where I lost my mind all over again. It's funny - my Italian seems to be at its most proficient in the moments when I am most deeply enamoured with Italy and its culture. My eyes unable to take it all in at once, I flitted, hummingbird-like, from market stall to market stall, asking over and over again in fluent Italian different variants of, "What is that and can I eat it???"
There were fishmongers and butchers (some displaying entire haunches of raw wild boar, coarse black fur still intact), salumerias selling artisanal, saffron- and pistachio-flavoured cheeses, prosciutto and the iconic Tuscan salami, pasticcerias and panificios (bakeries for pastries and bread), fresh produce stands marketing everything from durian to zucchini blossoms, stands with rainbow mosaics of more varieties of dried fruit than I had ever seen, olive oil shops, wine shops and shops selling authentic balsamic vinegar of Modena (the real stuff ages a minimum of twelve years. Our own mass-produced supermarket variety? Two months). There were also bars where patrons could pause for a flawlessly made espresso and paste, and trippaios making the exclusively Florentine "panino al lampredotto", a cow's stomach sandwich that I haven't quite decided what I think of yet.
And the best part of all of this? Many of the stalls offer free samples of their products to help you decide what you want to take home. Hence, I got to try REAL balsamic vinegar (believe me when I say it's an entirely different animal than what we buy at home - heavily viscous and almost sweet), wild boar salami, black truffle tapenade, pesto-flavoured Pecorino and smoked-pepper Gorgonzola.... I already had my eye on a sinister-looking panino di porchetta at a highly-recommended wine bar down the street for lunch, but I ended up taking with me (for future meals in) a hunk of sweet Pecorino, some Tuscan salami, dried figs and clementines and a personal-sized straw-wrapped flask of chianti. All for about €10.
I had a 10AM lunch (complete with a glass of house red) at Casa del Vino, Gianni Migliorini's wine bar tucked behind the market stalls of San Lorenzo on Via dell'Ariento. I was determined to get there early (they open at 9:30 and draw huge crowds all day), and in doing so had the pleasure of conversing with the woman setting out bruschetta and antipasti behind the counter. The huge slab of porchetta wasn't out yet, but she offered to make the sandwich for me anyway, disappearing into the kitchen for a moment to hack off the meat and stuff it between some fresh bread. Hands down best porchetta I've had in Italy to date.
The woman asked if I was here on holiday, where I was from, what I'd studied in school, if I was here alone. "Brava," she nodded authoritative approval when I answered in the affirmative. Good for you. Before I left she told me what I should try the next time I was here, if I came back, and gave me the name of her husband's restaurant on Via Borgo La Croce. "Ask for Roberto," she instructed. "Tell him I sent you. He'll treat you well."
I smiled, the corners of my mouth nearly reaching my eyes, and thanked her.
I was walking on the Ponte Vecchio later and stopped to look out over the wide expanse of the Arno. I felt the warmth of the Tuscan sun radiating off the water, the gentle breeze sweeping down from the olive-coloured hills in the distance, squinted right toward the archaic Oltrarno neighbourhood, admiring the contrast of the sienna and burnt-orange villas against the green background. Down below, a kayaker was rowing his narrow vessel under the bridge.
Craving something sweet, I reached into the plastic bag dangling from my wrist and pulled out one of the dried, candied clementines I'd bought at the market. Never having tasted a candied clementine before, I raised it to my lips and sunk my teeth in, not expecting anything more or less than dried fruit as I kept my eyes on the river. I froze mid-chew. Sweet, citrus-flavoured nectar oozed into my mouth like honey. Tangy and succulent and just a tiny bit bitter, it reminded me of those chewy, jewel-shaped fruit gusher snacks I had when I was a kid - the ones with the liquid centres - only natural and infinitely better. I closed my eyes. Per amore di Dio, I thought. Chewing slowly, I rested both elbows on the Ponte Vecchio's stone sides, wondering how I was ever going to leave this place, how it had taken me so long to get here. As Marcello would say, none of that matters. I'm here now.
- comments
ZIO amazing experience, keep writing , i will read, e ti amo