Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (89 page)

Day 1

The Accademia Gallery, starring Michelangelo’s
David.

The Monastery of San Marco: Fra Angelico murals.

The Medici Chapels.

The Cathedral Baptistery and Ghiberti’s Bronze Doors.

Giotto’s Tower.

Dinner near the Piazza della Signoria.

Day
2

The Bargello Museum.

The Duomo Museum, including Donatello.

The Church of Santa Maria Novella, Masaccio.

The Uffizi Galleries: reserve a month in advance.

Dinner in the Oltrarno district.
⁴

Why do they say Oltrarno in Florence, but Trastevere in Rome?
*

The literary cognoscenti choose the Dante Trail. Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) not only pioneered vernacular literature in Europe, he preceded all the other geniuses that Florence produced, and set the Renaissance in motion. The trail always begins at the Sasso di Dante, ‘Dante’s Stone’, from which the poet is said to have watched the laying of the cathedral’s foundations in 1296. Next, inside the cathedral, one gazes at Domenico di Michelino’s astonishing depiction of
Dante and his Poem
(1465), which portrays the garlanded and red-robed poet holding up a copy of his
Divine Comedy.
On the right of the picture rise the walls and turrets of Florence, with the Duomo behind; on the left, the pit of Hell, the mountain of Purgatory and the heaven of Paradise.

From the cathedral, the guide leads his party along the trail to the houses of the Portinari family. Dante’s Beatrice, the idealized woman who leads the poet from
Purgatorio
to
Paradiso
, was a Portinari who died young. The group passes thence in a couple of minutes to Dante’s own home, La Casa di Dante. Nearby stands the Palazzo de Bargello, a glowering structure that was once the seat of the
podestà
or ‘governor’. It was here, in 1301, that Dante’s banishment from Florence was proclaimed; a sentence that flowed from some obscure factional feud, it was a cruel prelude to a lifetime’s exile and to the endless moods of simmering anger and gnawing nostalgia that drove his pen through a hundred cantos. Outside the church of Santa Croce, one sees Pezzi’s over-life-size statue of Dante (1865) and inside, Ricci’s cenotaph to the Altissimo Poetà (1829). Santa Croce contains the tombs of Michelangelo and of Galileo, but not, of course, of Dante. Florence’s greatest son was not allowed home even to die.

Passing along the Via dei Neri, the ‘Street of the Blacks’, one is reminded of the rival factions whose feuds ruined Florentine politics. The Guelphs drove out the Ghibellines, before the victorious Guelphs themselves split into Blacks and Whites. Dante had belonged to the Whites, who lost out. At the former Palazzo dei Priori, one can still see the rooms where Dante participated in municipal meetings before his banishment.

In Dante’s time, the great open space of the Signoria was filled by the palaces of the powerful Uberti clan. Earlier in the thirteenth century the Uberti had championed the pro-imperial Ghibelline party. After the triumph of their anti-imperial Guelph enemies, their palaces were razed, leaving a void that can be seen and felt to this day.

Beside the Ponte Vecchio, the Tower of the Amidei is associated with the murder in 1215 of a young nobleman, Buondelmonte dei Buondelmonti, who had spurned a daughter of one of the oldest Florentine families, the Amidei. The murder is alluded to in Dante’s
Paradiso
, and was said to have sparked the original feud between Guelphs and Ghibellines. The nearby church of Santa Trinità used to house Cimabue’s
Madonna
(
c.
1280), which would have been known to Dante but which now hangs in the Uffizi. In Santa Maria Maggiore lies the tomb of Brunetto Latini, the Florentine philosopher to whom Dante was intellectually indebted. Despite placing him in the
Inferno
in the Ring of the Sodomites, Dante says to him: ‘
m’insegnavate come l’uom s’etterna
’, ‘you taught me how man makes himself eternal’.
⁵
The tour ends at the church of Santa Maria Novella, where one admires the frescoes of the Strozzi chapel painted by Filippino Lippi, and the great crucifix painted by Giotto, Cimabue’s pupil and Dante’s contemporary.
⁶

The poet, torn between admiration of his native city and disgust at its vices, railed bitterly in the
Inferno
against the ingratitude of his compatriots, who appeared to forget him:

Godi, Fiorenza, poi che se’ sì grande,

che per mare e per terra batti l’ali,

e per lo ‘nferno tuo nome si spande!

Rejoice, O Florence, you are so great

That your wings beat over land and sea,

And your name resounds through Hell!
⁷

Or again:

Florence mine, you might well be content…

You are rich, you’re at peace, and you’re wise…

[Yet], if you recall your past, and think clearly,

You will see yourself like a woman fallen sick

Who cannot find repose on the softest down,

Twisting, turning and seeking to ease her pain.
⁸

Dante called her Fiorenza – half-way between the Latin Florentia and the modern Firenze – but he need not have worried about his reputation in his native city. As we can see in a second set of frescoes in Santa Maria Novella, painted by Nardo di Cenio in the 1350s, Dante became a celebrity within a generation of his death.

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) is another towering genius whose presence in Florence can sometimes be overshadowed by his contemporaries. His tomb in Santa Croce bears the inscription ‘TANTO nomini nullum par elogium’: ‘No praise is sufficient for so great a man.’ Machiavelli was a man after Dante’s own heart: mordant, searingly honest, frequently funny, sardonic, and breathtaking in every other line he wrote. They would have got on famously. Machiavelli was an accomplished historian. His
History of Florence
(1520–25) is sometimes regarded as the pioneering work of modern European history; yet he is best known for his scintillating political commentary,
Il Principe
,
The Prince
. His no-nonsense advice to ruling princes made him famous. ‘A prince must learn
not
to be always good,’ he wrote, ‘but to be good or not as needs require.’ In the future, several of the world’s greatest statesmen were to keep a copy of Machiavelli in their pocket or at their bedside.
⁹

Such is the force of the Renaissance, however, that many visitors to Florence fail to realize that the city’s history cannot fairly be confined to one brilliant age. The city’s website lists thirteen main periods:

Foundation of the Roman colony, Florentia (59 BC).

Byzantine and Lombard periods.

The Carolingians.

Florence of the Communes.

13th Century: Guelphs and Ghibellines.

From the 14th Century to the Renaissance.

The Renaissance.

Great names of the 16th Century.

Decline of the Medici to 1737.

The Lorraine Period.

Risorgimento.

Florence as the capital of the Kingdom of Italy.

Florence of the Novecento (20th Century).
¹⁰

Two or three more periods may safely be added, especially if Florence’s surroundings are included. One of them, prior to Florentia’s founding, was that of the Etruscans, when present-day Tuscany lay at the centre of Italy’s most prominent prehistoric civilization. Another, in our own day, sees Florence at the heart of a huge influx of migrants and foreigners, who come to savour the ‘simple life’ that has been drowned elsewhere by modern living.
¹¹
The world of Dante and Machiavelli forms a suitable backdrop to a countryside where medieval villages and ancient farmhouses snuggle among the olive groves, and where the rich bask in the sun, sip Chianti, lament the modern rat race, and idealize vigorously:

For dinner tonight, we’ve stopped at the
rosticceria
and picked up some divine
gnocchi
made from semolina flour. I’ve made a salad. Ed brings out the Ambrae from Montepulciano and holds it up to the light.
Ambrae
… must be Latin, possibly for amber. I take a sip – maybe it
is
ambiance, the way dew on lilacs and oak leaves might taste.
Wine is light, held together by water.
I wish I’d said that, but Galileo did.

From the yard above the road, I see the cypresses graph a rise and fall against a sky blown clean of clouds by this afternoon’s wind. Stars are shooting over the valley, stars that fell even before the Etruscans watched from this hillside… Five, six, stars streak across the sky. I hold out my hand to catch one.
¹²

This is not a backward-looking city, however. Its president (that is, mayor), elected in February 2009, is a young, dynamic, centre-left politician, who is tipped to leap to the forefront of Italy’s national politics. Matteo Renzi (b. 1975) is demanding a clean-out of Berlusconi’s Augean Stables. His views are condensed in a book entitled
Fuori!
(‘Out!’). ‘I get nauseous thinking about Italy’s political class,’ he says; ‘it has done nothing in thirty years, and spends its time arguing on chat shows.’
¹³

*

Florence guards its secrets well. Those who know the city best are aware of things that never cross the path of the average tourist. The British colony in Florence, for example, goes back to medieval times. It did not originate with the stream of temporary visitors, like John Milton in 1638, who came here on the Grand Tour but then returned home, though it obviously did much to enliven the stay of such artistic tourists. It has been graced, among others, by such notables as George Nassau, 3rd Earl Cowper and Reichsfürst of the Holy Roman Empire (1739–89); Lord Henry Somerset (1849–1932), songwriter, sometime comptroller of Queen Victoria’s household and former husband of Lady Isabella Somers-Cocks; Una, Lady Troubridge (1887–1963), sculptress and sometime wife of an admiral; the inter-war group of English ladies known as
I Scorpioni
(‘The Scorpions’), who featured in Franco Zeffirelli’s film
Tea with Mussolini
(1999); and most recently Sir Harold Acton (1904–94), author of the inimitable
Memoirs of an Aesthete
(1948). A parallel list of literary names would include Radclyffe Hall (1880–1943), author of
The Well of Loneliness
(1928); Violet Paget (Vernon Lee, 1856–1935), novelist and inventor of the concept of ‘empathy’; Violet Keppel-Trefusis (1894–1972), daughter of King Edward VII’s mistress;
¹⁴
and the extraordinary double-bodied poet Michael Field (Katherine Bradley, 1846–1914 and Edith Cooper, 1862–1913), affectionately known as ‘the Mikes’. All of these exiles (and many more) can be described as art-lovers, bohemians and connoisseurs, and many were aristocrats, real or imagined. Yet they did not advertise the most important cause of their exile. All, or nearly all, were fugitives from the British law, and many were devoted to personal relationships that in Dante’s time – as in the case of Brunetto Latini – would have alerted the so-called ‘Office of the Night’. Habitual pretence was part of the game. Harold Acton threatened to sue on hearing that he might be ‘outed’ by a biographer and, while claiming to be merely observing ‘certain men in Florence’, coined the immortal phrase, ‘the queerer, the dearer’.
¹⁵