Florence: Conclusion

Neal will write part of the final entry on Florence, though he doesn’t know it yet. I asked him in email to remind me of the names of the members of his host family, who invited us to dine with them in their charming apartment in the foothills of their charming city. Mom and I would agree on this point: meeting local people and talking with them about their lives provide a more satisfying introduction to a place than any museum or piece of art or scoop of gelato or ancient architectural specimen.

But before we went to dinner at the Ferrinis, we went to a museum and ate gelato. We also strolled about eyeing architecture, and we did laundry (which gave us probably the greatest sense of accomplishment to this point of the trip). Having learned from our visit to the Uffizi, we gave ourselves only an hour to view the collection at the Galleria dell’ Academia. This is not to say that we rushed from room to room in order to swallow the collection in one vapid gulp. Given our time frame we chose what we most wanted to see—Michelangelo’s David—and savored it. Leading up to the central piece of the hall along both walls is an unfinished series also by Michelangelo. These large figures, frozen or trapped in the rough marble from which they seem to struggle in vain to escape, set the grandiose but somehow unassuming David off as perfect in the simple fact of its completion. It sounds as if I’m dismissing its artistic merit as merely contextual, but while I loved the unfinished works, which were each appropriately labeled “prisoner,” I found myself circling the David as I might a new car, but with more reverence, greater awe, and a much more controllable urge to run my finger along its surface. Its power was eerie and calming at once, just as it was itself at once simple and confounding.

I suspect my awe to be in part the result of setting, as I explained above, and the entrance fee, because two exact copies of it, both of which stand in the open air as the David originally stood (one before the Duomo), carried no such weight. Perhaps the indoor David is better maintained or seems bigger, bolder within its walls; perhaps I retained all my expectations of Michelangelo and my museum attention for the David alone. Or perhaps had I given the copies equal time, their power would have occurred to me as well, the power in the figure’s lines, its accuracy, in the sad, set eyes, in the historical implications of what has just occurred and what is yet to come, repose with the promise of movement, maybe sudden movement, the biblical story and, somehow, God together slung and hidden behind the figure’s back as if to foreground, instead, the human form and the humanist in Michelangelo, or the homosexual, or to suggest a faith and humility that has never seemed so knowing, so arrogant.

Thanks to Neal’s host family, we also had an unexpected chance to view the second copy of the David, which is made of bronze and has since turned the color of the Incredible Hulk. Neal mentions it below in his brief synopsis of our dinner with his host family, Bruno and Anna Ferrini, and their son, Marco:

“The address was 50 Via di Quarto, Bagno a Ripoli (I don't know the post code). That whole street (the street of unleashed dogs, blind corners, impending death) is Via di Quarto. Bagno a Ripoli is just southeast of Florence (more east than south). We took the route 33 bus. Before Bruno dropped you and Mom off in town, we stopped at Piazza Michelangelo, where the bronze copy of the David overlooks the city to the north (so the piazza is just south of the river Arno, just outside the old city wall). . . . Anyway, I know we must have talked about the Church, though I can't remember specifics. Probably something about Ana being a member for so long in Florence. Something about different missions around the world. Probably some conversation about language (tomato being the same word in Russian as well as Italian). Of course we talked about the meal. We had that summertime meal for farm laborers (I can't remember the name, but I am chasing down the recipe); you know, the one where you soak hard bread in water for 30 minutes, then mix the remaining grains with olive oil, vinegar, sliced cucumbers, tomatoes, and basil. Nobody believes me when I tell them how good it is. Something about the idea that soaking bread must make it soggy. Mom liked it, if I remember correctly. There was another meal I wasn't so fond of with rice, and Vienna sausages. There may have been more, like a main course, but I can't recall. I'm sure there was no meat, per your request. We drank Bionda, a Tuscany favorite (and, subsequently, only available in Tuscany). And of course we had fresh mozzarella, and marveled at it as at a newborn child. I remember I couldn't finish it because I was so full, and you refused it because you were so full.”

A better meal by far, and a bigger one, than the meal Mom and I hurried to have on the banks of the Arno before our last night’s activity: a recital of the Florence International Music Campus in the hall of the centuries-old English Church of St. Mark, Via Magio 18. An expensive shared risotto, but the sunset that accompanied it was priceless, and the way the light gilded the river and the shops on Ponte Vecchio fit right into our Italian “finale,” and the whole scene now coheres in my memory like a postcard. Whenever I pull out the postcard, I smell the cool air of that evening, see the vivid blue of the river, green of its banks, and I hear the sounds of a technically proficient eight-year-old at the violin, the full operatic tenor of an exchange student from America singing Verdi, Schubert, and Tosti, and a collection of Japanese piano students in pastel dresses at an all-black Yamaha playing Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Debussy, and, as if I’d requested it for the finale of our final day, Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 op 23 in G minor.

The benches were wooden and the backs were sticky from the varnish that failed more miserably than we patrons to stand up against the heat in the church. It was a vicious cycle. The hard bench required continual, but subtle, shifting of weight; each subtle shift made the sound of someone removing unwanted tape from a countertop; and the church echoed each shift as if tattling on each of us for daring to feel discomfort during Debussy. The concert started late and lasted well past eleven, but despite this and any physical inconvenience, we held on for Chopin, exited stiff and mesmerized, and found ourselves in late-evening Florence among the unparalleled quiet and fragrant cool of the ancient artistic center. We felt compelled to walk briskly, partly to comply with habit, partly to get the blood flowing, partly to shuttle through the unknown of a foreign midnight. But this unexpected landscape was perhaps the more intriguing for its unfamiliarity. Its Italian streets seemed more authentic in the conspicuous absence of tourists, and in that absence we two tourists suddenly faded into the possibility, however remote, of fitting in.