Maiden Voyages (42 page)

A false idea of Florence grew up in the nineteenth century, thanks in great part to the Brownings and their readers—a tooled-leather idea of Florence as a dear bit of the old world. Old maids of both sexes—retired librarians, governesses, ladies with reduced incomes, gentlemen painters, gentlemen sculptors, gentlemen poets, anaemic amateurs and dabblers of every kind—“fell in love” with Florence and settled down to make it home. Queen Victoria did water colours in the hills at Vincigliata; Florence Nightingale’s parents named her after the city, where she was born in 1820—a sugary statue of her stands holding a lamp in the first cloister of Santa Croce. Early in the present century, a retired colonel, G. F. Young of the Indian Service, who, it is said, was unable to read Italian, appointed himself defender of the Medicis and turned out a spluttering “classic” that went through many editions, arguing that the Medicis had been misrepresented by democratic historians. (There is a story in Turgenev of a retired major who used to practice doctoring on the peasants. “Has he studied medicine?” someone asks. “No, he hasn’t studied,” is the answer. “He does it more from philanthropy.” This was evidently the case with Colonel Young.) Colonel
Young was typical of the Anglo-American visitors who, as it were, expropriated Florence, occupying villas in Fiesole or Bellosguardo, studying Tuscan wild flowers, collecting ghost stories, collecting triptychs and diptychs, burying their dogs in the churchyard of the Protestant Episcopal church, knowing (for the most part) no Florentines but their servants. The Brownings, in Casa Guidi, opposite the Pitti Palace, revelled in Florentine history and hated the Austrian usurper, who lived across the street, but they did not mingle socially with the natives; they kept themselves to themselves. George Eliot spent fifteen days in a Swiss
pensione
on Via Tornabuoni, conscientiously working up the background for
Romola
, a sentimental pastiche of Florentine history that was a great success in its period and is the least read of her novels today. It smelled of libraries, Henry James complained, and the foreign colony’s notion of Florence, like
Romola
, was bookish, synthetic, gushing, insular, genteel, and, above all, proprietary. This sickly love (“our Florence,” “my Florence”) on the part of the foreign residents implied, like all such loves, a tyrannous resistance to change. The rest of the world might alter, but, in the jealous eyes of its foreign owners, Florence was supposed to stay exactly as it was when they found it—a dear bit of the Old World.

Florence can never have been that, at any time in its existence. It is not a shrine of the past, and it rebuffs all attempts to make it into one, just as it rebuffs tourists. Tourism, in a certain sense, is an accidental by-product of the city—at once profitable and a nuisance, adding to the noise and congestion, raising prices for the population. Florence is a working city, a market centre, a railway junction; it manufactures furniture (including antiques), shoes, gloves, handbags, textiles, fine underwear, nightgowns, and table linens, picture frames, luggage, chemicals, optical equipment, machinery, wrought iron, various novelties in straw. Much of this work is done in small shops on the Oltrarno, the Florentine Left Bank, or on the farms of the
contado
; there is not much big industry but there is a multitude of small crafts and trades. Every Friday is market day on the Piazza della Signoria, and the peasants come with pockets full of samples from the farms in the Valdarno and the Chianti: grain, oil, wine, seeds. The small hotels and cheap restaurants are full of commercial travellers, wine salesmen from Certaldo
or Siena, textile representatives from Prato, dealers in marble from the Carrara mountains, where Michelangelo quarried. Everyone is on the move, buying, selling, delivering, and tourists get in the way of this diversified commerce. The Florentines, on the whole, would be happy to be rid of them. The shopkeepers on the Lungarno and on Ponte Vecchio, the owners of hotels and restaurants, the thieves, and the widows who run
pensiones
might regret their departure, but the tourist is seldom led to suspect this. There is no city in Italy that treats its tourists so summarily, that caters so little to their comfort.

There are no gay bars or smart outdoor cafés; there is very little night life, very little vice. The food in the restaurants is bad, for the most part, monotonous, and rather expensive. Many of the Florentine specialties—tripe, paunch, rabbit, and a mixture of the combs, livers, hearts, and testicles of roosters—do not appeal to the foreign palate. The wine can be good but is not so necessarily. The waiters are slapdash and hurried; like many Florentines, they give the impression of being preoccupied with something else, something more important—a knotty thought, a problem. At one of the “typical” restaurants, recommended by the big hotels, the waiters, who are a family, treat the clients like interlopers, feigning not to notice their presence, bawling orders sarcastically to the kitchen, banging down the dishes, spitting on the floor. “Take it or leave it” is the attitude of the
pensione
-keeper of the better sort when showing a room; the inferior
pensiones
have a practice of shanghaiing tourists. Runners from these establishments lie in wait on the road, just outside the city limits, for cars with foreign licence plates; they halt them, leap aboard, and order the driver to proceed to a certain address. Strangely enough, the tourists often comply, and report to the police only later, when they have been cheated in the
pensiones
. These shades of Dante’s highwaymen are not the only ones who lie in wait for travellers. One of the best Florentine restaurants was closed by the police a few years ago—for cheating a tourist. Complaints of foreign tourists pour every day into the
questura
and are recorded in the morning newspaper; they have been robbed and victimized everywhere; their cars, parked on the Piazza della Signoria or along the Arno, have been rifled in broad daylight or spirited away. The northern races—Germans and Swedes—appear to be the chief prey, and the commonest complaint
is of the theft of a camera. Other foreigners are the victims of accidents; one old American lady, the mother-in-law of an author, walking on Via Guicciardini, had the distinction of being hit by two bicycles, from the front and rear simultaneously (she was thrown high into the air and suffered a broken arm); some British tourists were injured a few years ago by a piece falling off Palazzo Bartolini Salimbeni (1517–20) in Piazza Santa Trinita. Finally the sidewalk in front of that crumbling building was closed off and a red lantern posted: beware of falling masonry.
^*
Recently, during the summer, a piece weighing 132 pounds fell off the cornice of the National Library; a bus-conductor, though, rather than a tourist or foreign student, just missed getting killed and, instead, had his picture in the paper.

All summer long, or as long as the tourist season lasts, the “
Cronaca di Firenze
” or city news of the
Nazione
, that excellent morning newspaper, is a daily chronicle of disaster to foreigners, mixed in with a few purely local thefts, frauds, automobile accidents, marital quarrels, and appeals for the preservation of monuments. The newspaper deplores the Florentine thieves, who are giving the city a bad name, like the noisemakers (
i selvaggi
). It seeks to promote in its readers a greater understanding of the foreigner, a greater sympathy with his eating habits, his manner of dress, and so on. Yet an undertone of irony, typically Florentine, accompanies this official effort; it is the foreigners with their cameras and wads of currency who appear to be the “savages,” and the thieves who are behaving naturally. A series of “sympathetic” articles on tourism was illustrated with decidedly unsympathetic photographs, showing touristic groups masticating spaghetti, tourists entering the Uffizi naked to the waist.

On the street, the Florentines do not like to give directions; if you are lost, you had better ask a policeman. Unlike the Venetians, the Florentines will never volunteer to show a sight to a passing stranger. They do not care to exhibit their city; the monuments are there—let the foreigners find them. Nor is this a sign of indifference, but of a peculiar pride and dignity. Florentine sacristans can never be found to turn on the lights to illuminate a fresco or an altar painting; they do
not seem to take an interest in the tip. Around the Masolino-Masaccio-Filippino Lippi frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine, small groups of tourists wait, uneasily whispering; they try to find the lights for themselves; they try looking for someone in the sacristy. Finally a passing priest flicks on the electricity and hurries off, his robes flying. The same thing happens with the Ghirlandaio frescoes in Santa Trinita. Far from hovering, as the normal sacristan does, in ambush, waiting to expound the paintings, the Florentine sacristan does not make himself manifest until just before closing time, at midday, when he becomes very active, shooing people out of the church with shrill whistles and threatening gestures of his broom. If there are postcards for sale in a church, there is usually nobody to sell them.

This lack of co-operative spirit, this absence, this preoccupation, comes, after a time, and if you are not in a hurry, to seem one of the blessings of Florence, to make it, even, a hallowed place. This is one of the few cities where it is possible to loiter, undisturbed, in the churches, looking at the works of art. After the din outside, the churches are extraordinarily peaceful, so that you walk about on tiptoe, fearful of breaking the silence, of distracting the few old women, dimly seen, from their prayers. You can pass an hour, two hours, in the great churches of Brunelleschi—Santo Spirito and San Lorenzo—and no one will speak to you or pay you any heed. Touristic parties with guides do not penetrate here; they go instead to the Medici Chapels, to see the Michelangelos. The smaller churches—Santa Trinita, Santa Felicita, Ognissanti, Santissima Annunziata, Santa Maria Maddelena dei Pazzi, San Giovannino dei Cavalieri—are rarely visited; neither is the Pazzi Chapel in the court of Santa Croce, and the wonderful Giottos, freshly restored, in the Bardi Chapel of Santa Croce, still surrounded by a shaky scaffold, are seen only by art critics, their families and friends. San Miniato, on its hill, is too far away for most tourists; it is the church that, as they say, they missed. And the big churches of the preaching orders, Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce, and the still bigger Duomo, where Savonarola delivered sermons to audiences of ten thousand, swallow up touristic parties, leaving hardly a trace. The tourists then complain of feeling “dwarfed” by this architecture. They find it “cold,” unwelcoming.

As for the museums, they are the worst-organized, the worst-hung in Italy—a scandal, as the Florentines say themselves, with a certain civic pride. The exception, the new museum that has been opened in the old Fort of the Belvedere, with pale walls, wide views, cool rooms, sparsely hung, immediately became a subject of controversy, as did the new rooms of the Uffizi, which were held to be too white and uncluttered.

In the streets, the famous parti-coloured monuments in geometric designs—the Baptistery, Giotto’s bell tower, the Duomo, the façade of Santa Maria Novella—are covered with grime and weather stains. The Duomo and the Bell Tower are finally getting a bath, but this is a tedious process that has been going on for years; by the time the Duomo’s front is washed, the back will be dirty again. Meanwhile, the green, white, and pink marbles stand in scaffolding, while the traffic whizzes around them. The Badia, the old Benedictine abbey, where the Good Margrave, Ugo of Tuscany (Dante’s
“gran barone”
) lies buried and which has now been partly incorporated into the police station, is leaking so badly that on a rainy Sunday parishioners of the Badia church have had to hear mass with their umbrellas up; it was here that Dante used to see Beatrice at mass. Among the historic palaces that remain in private hands, many, like Palazzo Bartolini Salimbeni, are literally falling to pieces. The city has no money to undertake repairs; the Soprintendenza delle Belle Arti has no money; private owners say they have no money.

Historic Florence is an incubus on its present population. It is like a vast piece of family property whose upkeep is too much for the heirs, who nevertheless find themselves criticized by strangers for letting the old place go to rack and ruin. History, in Venice, has been transmuted into legend; in Rome, the Eternal City, history is an everlasting present, an orderly perspective of arches receding from popes to Caesars with the papacy guaranteeing permanence and framing the vista of the future—decay being but an aspect of time’s grandeur. If St. Peter’s were permitted to fall to pieces, it would still inspire awe, as the Forum does, while the dilapidation of Venetian palaces, reflected in lapping waters, is part of Venetian myth, celebrated already by Guardi and Belloto in the eighteenth century. Rome had Piranesi; Naples had Salvatore Rosa;
but Florentine decay, in the Mercato Vecchio and the crooked byways of the Ghetto (now all destroyed and replaced by the Piazza della Repubblica), inspired only bad nineteenth-century water-colourists, whose work is preserved, not in art galleries, but in the topographical museum under the title of “
Firenze Come Era
” (“Florence as It Was”). History, for Florence, is neither a legend nor eternity, but a massive weight of rough building stone demanding continual repairs, pressing on the modern city like a debt, blocking progress.

This was a city of progress. Nothing could be more un-Florentine, indeed more anti-Florentine, than the protective custody exercised by its foreign residents, most of whom have abandoned the city today, offended by the Vespas, the automobile horns, the Communists, and the rise in the cost of living. Milanese businessmen are moving into their villas and installing new tiled bathrooms with coloured bathtubs and toilet seats, linoleum and plastics in the kitchen, television sets and bars. These Milanesi are not popular; they too are
“selvaggi,”
like their Lombard predecessors who descended on Tuscany in the sixth century to brutalize and despoil it. Yet these periodic invasions belong to Florentine life, which is penetrated by the new and transforms it into something newer. Florence has always been a city of extremes, hot in the summer, cold in the winter, traditionally committed to advance, to modernism, yet containing backward elements narrow as its streets, cramped, stony, recalcitrant. It was the city where during the last war individual Fascists still held out fanatically after the city was taken by the Allies, and kept shooting as if for sport from the roof tops and loggias at citizens in the streets below. Throughout the Mussolini period, the Fascists in Florence had been the most violent and dangerous in Italy; at the same time, Florence had been the intellectual centre of anti-Fascism, and during the Resistance, the city as a whole “redeemed itself” by a series of heroic exploits. The peasants of the
contado
showed a fantastic bravery in hiding enemies of the regime, and in the city many intellectuals and a few aristocrats risked their lives with great hardihood for the Resistance network. Florence, in short, was split, as it had always been, between the best and the worst. Even the Germans here were divided into two kinds. While the S.S. was torturing victims in a house on Via Bolognese (a nineteenth-century upper-middle-class
“residential” district), across the city, on the old Piazza Santo Spirito, near Brunelleschi’s church, the German Institute was hiding anti-Nazis in its library of reference works on Florentine art and culture. The chief arm of the S.S. was a Florentine devil strangely named “Carita,” who acted as both informer and torturer; against the S.S., the chief defence was the German consul, who used his official position to save people who had been denounced. After the Liberation, the consul was given the freedom of the city, in recognition of the risky work he had done. Such divisions, such extremism, such contrasts are
Firenze Come Era
—a terrible city, in many ways, uncomfortable and dangerous to live in, a city of drama, argument, and struggle.