It is about 5:30 on a now warm spring afternoon and outside my apartment window someone is playing a tenor saxophone, a longing refrain I cannot place, but the mere sound of it fills me up with gratitude. I have heard this music maker on other late afternoons and have been touched and warmed by the mournful sounds coming through the air...
When I decided to make this journey to Florence I - of course - had a certain plan in mind. I was going to walk the streets endlessly in order to recapture old memories from my early time here, which was in the late 50's. A very long time ago. I was sure that the sights, the smells, sounds, and all the endless overlapping voices would take me back. Of course what I've discovered is that I cannot get back to the time when I was eleven years old. It apparently is not humanly possible. So, I have been ruminating on that truth and taking in all the sensations instead. What has come to mind and the refrain I have communicated to a dear friend in a letter is the phrase: things change, and things stay the same ... The Florence I am marching through today is very different from the city I lived in when I went to Miss Barry's American School for expat children here in Florence in the fifties. For one thing, people did not have cell phone/cameras so they could take "selfies" randomly no matter where they went. Visitors instead marched the treacherous cobbled streets with their little red Baedecker guides, which at the time were the top of the line guidebooks for all European cities. I don't believe gelato stands were a dime a dozen with the huge lines spilling onto the narrow sidewalks, and I also don't remember pizza being the most sought after snack a tourist might want. The lines to get into museums were non-existent, and the prices of course were lower. The Africans hadn't discovered this city as a convenient market for street sales of everything from sunglasses to bad umbrellas... And I don't remember that there were these clever unobtrusive mimes stationed by the Uffizi to charm you with their mystery. It used to be true that cars could race through the center of the old city at will, and that now has been changed. Too many people, too many cars. There were no high end designer dress shops that offered unadulterated glamour at very steep prices, nor were there as many souvenir shops all selling the same things.
But here is the good news. There is a lot that hasn't changed: the smell of the hideously uneven cobble stone streets which reek of ancient dampness and sometimes of urine (which you somehow ignore), the bells that chime at different hours in any one of the hundreds of churches in this city, the magnificence of churches like Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella and of course the Carmine church with its Brancacci chapel. And the old women with tattered shawls that sit by the church doors begging for money that will help them survive. The Italians have been sitting down to lunch at around 1:30 or 2:00 every day in trattorias in this city and consuming large bottles of mineral water and liters of wine, along with pasta and bland unsalted bread and some grilled meat, talking nonstop and always finishing up with a cafe. Pastry shop windows have always been works of art, with trays and trays of chocolates, fruit tarts, meringues, and various cantucci all dusted generously with sugar. And vegetable stands have always offered up the dramatic looking purple artichokes, fat white bulbs of fennel, shiny zucchini with their flowers, and the outrageously plump red tomatoes... Food has always been on display in Italy, in every town and every village for centuries, reminding you of the joys of nourishing the body and the heart. To go into a cheese shop is to have a detour into cheese heaven, but you must be patient and not be afraid to ask for a taste. This has always been so. The Ponte Vecchio ("old bridge") is the most famous of the many bridges that stretch across the Arno, and it houses countless little miniature shops that peddle gold and other precious jewelry, keeping alive a centuries old tradition. The stuff you see is fine and quite expensive, and perhaps that has not always been so, but it is a delight to enter one of these shops and sit down on a velvet upholstered chair and indulge in gazing at all the glitter. There are restaurants in this town that have been around for a very long time indeed -- they may have photos on the wall to prove it -- and they tend to serve pretty down home basic Florentine cuisine, which translates to a whole lot of meat, white beans with olive oil, crostini with chicken livers, ribollita, papa pomodoro, and the odd sautéed vegetable (usually spinach with lots of butter - the best spinach I have ever had).
So, it would seem that though I believed I was here to unearth old buried memories, I instead just came to partake of Florence's ongoing culture, the timeless pieces that draw everyone here. People from other countries come to visit to receive the graceful manners of Italians, eat the hearty and often beautiful food, drink the good earthy wine, and look at the timeless stone buildings and the extraordinary wealth of Renaissance art. These people who come now don't look as interesting to me as visitors did long ago, but that's because I've unfortunately developed some entrenched prejudices now that I am seventy years old, and one of them is about a lack of reverence or attention to the amazing historical elements we find in this city. People wander about in shorts and tennis shoes and cell phones, and they take their "selfies" in front of every possible important monument and painting, and they don't appear to me to be soaking in the richness that is right there before them. Of course, I have no way of knowing, do I? I just see what I see. But finally, it doesn't matter what I think. The important thing is that these thousands of millions of people have found their way here, and are trying to navigate through a now very complicated maze of ancient culture with little patience and perhaps an absence of curiosity. But they are here. And they may go home altered, as I went home altered in 1959... I can only hope this is possible.
Church bells just chimed again for the third time since I began, and the saxophone player sadly has retired for the evening. The golden light is falling over the expanse of ochre houses with red tile roofs and there's a certain feeling of blessing. This is my favorite time of the day in Italy ... the sinking of the sun and the slowing down of the movements of people... I will rest tonight, I hope, in the knowledge that plumbing my ancient memories is not what I needed to do here, because what presents itself to me in this present moment is rich and good enough, and it does remind me that I was very fortunate to have been a tender young girl living in this quirky, cranky old city over fifty years ago.
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