July 10th, 2018
We have rented a studio apartment that, with its tall ceilings and spacious bathroom and washing machine, is arguably an upgrade from either of the apartments we lived in in New York over the last couple of years. It sits inside a big, cool, yellow building on a residential street outside the city center.
The city center itself is a winding stone maze where we dodge cars and motorbikes and gelato-wielding pedestrians. Negotiating traffic here feels very much like a game you’d play in a medieval Brooklyn, although the etiquette to get around someone involves crashing straight into them and then continuing without saying anything (I have tried this. It really is the preferred strategy. People don’t even look upset).
The buildings are cool and tall and close together. There are few trees; many arches; jaw-droppingly beautiful statues around every corner.
It is hot here; the sun seems bigger than it does other places, and it beats down with white calm, pressing over the course of the morning until there is nothing you can do but go inside until evening.
In the mornings and evenings, we leave our apartment and wander along the river or across it, up to Michelangelo’s rose garden; across blazing plazas with green and blue and white marble churches at one end. We drink Aperol spritz and house wine and people watch; we read bad mysteries (okay – I read bad mysteries; a summer regression.)
Two blocks away is a market, where we find bright peaches, ripe melons, cherries, sweet ribbed zucchinis with their flowers still attached. Florentine tomatoes, which have a dark red skin and a sweet interior.
Almost every day we each eat a sandwich that is bigger than our faces; they are made of sliced warm foccacia and filled with creamy cheese; salami and thin ham and radicchio; artichokes and olive tapenade; roasted eggplants and zucchini. They are sold from small, unimpressive storefronts all over the city and every day I think, I will never be able to eat one of those again, and every day… I manage. At night we open our windows to the marginally cooler courtyard and eat tomatoes and bread, fried eggs, bowls of green beans.
It is quiet here, even when it is loud. It is old, even when the restaurant opened recently. We have just gotten comfortable enough to feel restless, and we have only two weeks left.
July 15th, 2018
People come to Florence from all over the world for its art. We are now zealous advocates of this strategy.
Art drips from balconies and arches and windows and spills out of buildings with the overflowing richness of vegetation in a rainforest. It is spectacular, from unnamed statues affixed to the outside of anonymous buildings, to the bottoms of lampposts, door knockers and archways. In one otherwise unremarkable square, there is a larger than life version of Hercules wrestling a lion. I happened one morning upon Loggia dei Lanzi, a sort of open-air sculpture garden next to the famous Uffizi galleries. Here, Perses holds Medusa’s head aloft; Menelaus cradles Petroclus’ body.
These, in flowing stone, contain more – more movement, more depth, more history, more stories – than (almost?) any art I have ever seen anywhere else in the world.
A huge statement – but I will never be disabused of the idea that I get to decide whether I like something, and that whether I like it matters.
It’s of course true that I love the stories behind these statues. They are my favorite ones. An undeniable part of the reason that I felt compelled to sit in the Loggia, full-throated and full of awe, for over an hour, is that I love seeing the myths I love brought to life.
But pictures and descriptions do not do these breathing stones justice. (Nor should they – one medium is not so easily subsumed into another.) It’s not just the size, though they are larger than life. It’s not the intricacy of the detail – the veins in the centaur’s leg, the desperate reach of a woman’s hand, the arch of Menelaus’ back, the fierce rolling of Medusa’s eyes. These sculptures move. They roil. They seethe.
Is it because they are made of marble, of bronze? Is it because of how still and smooth and constant the material seems in contrast to the stories it is telling, in comparison with my own frail body? Sitting quietly in an echoing corner of the 14th century building in which these stories are almost casually housed, there was no question that I was more still, or more insubstantial, than the stone.
Does it recall stories of people being turned to stone? In Greek mythology, characters are turned to stone at the height of their movement. For vanity, because they looked on a monster, because they angered a god, because they looked back when they ought to be moving forward. So there is a way to think about being turned to stone that is not just a stilling, but an entrapment of movement. And standing in front of these stones, there is no question that they contain movement.
Of course, if I am honest, two things are true. One is that I could go on talking about these stories and the ways people have interpreted them forever. Because with each little revelation there is the illusion of getting closer to something (something!). The other is that talking about these sculptures seems a little bit sacrilege. Like over-analyzing a favorite book or movie, it almost makes them worse. Descriptions and criticism pale in importance or gut-punch to the actual experience of standing under the arches of the Loggia dei Lanzi, gaping. Surrounded by still as stone marble that moves. I swear – it moves. Despite everything.
And I think art should leave you breathless. It should be so alive that you wonder what it would be like to turn to stone.
July 28th, 2018
Watching Florence sink into tourist season is like watching a good friend become close with someone who you don’t like. Oh… her. Again? Over the last weeks, hordes of eager sightseers have descended into the small and winding streets like the ants you buy for an ant farm, scrambling around as though they have been tipped in by an unseen hand above. We have taken to avoiding the historical downtown almost entirely; it is the Brooklyn Bridge on a sunny Saturday. It is Telegraph Avenue the week school starts. It is its own international buzzing den of missed communication and incompatible people skills. Sam and I have started talking about personal space like it is a tool that hasn’t been invented yet. If only we had this. Things would be better.
Of course, if living in New York has taught us anything, it is that tourist hubs develop for a reason; that you are never the only one to have a good idea. And we have, by means of long morning walks and skillful googling, found near-empty cafés where the cappuccino is perfect and 1 euro; isolated benches in rose gardens. We have become regular iced coffee and afternoon spritz drinkers at a mysteriously empty riverside café near our apartment, where they now give us tiny powdered sugar-dusted squares of banana bread, or small bruschetta, whether or not we order it.
We can feel the month here drawing closed; the looming transition means we are only halfway here, in our bodies. We are also wondering whether the car we rented in Crete will make it up the hill to our first stop there, and we are gulping thirstily in this small stone city, hoping for a breath of ocean air. Waiting for somewhere we can shed our thickening summer skins.
Last night the lunar eclipse rose over the Arno like a small red fruit, easily missable but, once spotted, haunting and unmistakable. The last time I saw a lunar eclipse, it was the fall of 2015. I was about a week away from leaving Providence, where I had gone like an injured animal to lick the wounds of early 20’s indecision and self-doubt while Sam started school at RISD. I was on the verge of taking my life by the shoulders and making it my own: in New Orleans, in New York, in Thailand, in remote reaches of the Arizona desert. On my computer, I had just named a file, “Naomi writes a book draft 1.”
Change is holy. Things are so different now.
And yet, last night, as we stood packed like sardines along the banks of the Arno with everyone else in Florence, mosquito bites like constellations across our skin, days away from Greece, and on our way to some new wilderness of adulthood (never let anyone tell you adulthood can’t be wild), I felt the same electricity I did in 2015: here something comes.
(click any of these for the full image)
