Florence Read Free Page A

immense pizzeria on Via del Proconsolo, we ended up sharing a table with an American woman in her forties and a Roman man in his seventies. It turned out that she was the design director for Ferragamo and that he had opened the first-ever pizzeria in Florence, some twenty-five years earlier. Such a grouping is fairly easy to fall into here, and if I report it with some surprise, it is only because it took place not at the chic Trattoria delle Belle Donne, or at Cibreo, but at Yellow Bar with its Buffalo Bill posters, its menu in English, and its crew of touts sent out into the center every afternoon to hand out flyers: in short, at the very sort of ‘tourist’ restaurant that as a student visiting Florence in the early nineteen eighties I would have avoided like the plague. Yet it was also at Yellow Bar that we once saw Franz Brüggen, conductor of the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, having a pizza after a concert at the Teatro della Pergola; at Yellow Bar that we have often seen the earthily handsome Romeo brothers, owners of an office-supply shop on Via dellaCondotta, whose penetrating eyes have provoked more than one art historian to spend twenty minutes choosing a pencil; at Yellow Bar, finally, that we sometimes see – still handsome after all these years, with thick, graying hair – the actor who played the carriage driver in the Merchant-Ivory film of A Room with a View, the one who sends Lucy into the violets to be kissed by George Emerson. Phaethon – as Forster called this driver – now runs a souvenir shop at the top of Via del Proconsolo. He is a regular at Yellow Bar, usually sitting at a corner booth, and often accompanied by a beautiful Japanese woman who may or may not have come to Italy to seduce him, after seeing her destiny spelled out one winter afternoon on the screen of an Osaka cinema, into which she had run to escape the rain … No, probably not. And yet something about Florence encourages one to the most sentimental speculation and fantasy.
    In no sense of the word is Florence a ‘big’ city, and this has always been part of its appeal. In Rome you depend on buses, in Paris the Métro and taxis. In Florence, on the other hand, youcan get pretty much anywhere you need to on foot, even the countryside, which opens out just beyond the Belvedere, at the top of Costa San Giorgio. Or perhaps I should say, you can get everywhere you need to on foot if you begin your trek within the limits of what Henry James called ‘the compact and belted mass of which the Piazza della Signoria [is] the immemorial centre’. Writing in 1873, James was already lamenting the ‘expansion’ of this mass, ‘under the treatment of enterprising syndics, into an ungirdled organism of the type, as they viciously say, of Chicago; one of those places of which, as their grace of a circumference is nowhere, the dignity of a centre can no longer be predicated’.
    It would not please James to learn that a hundred and thirty years later, the expansion has only intensified, its most recent efflorescence being the construction of a tram to connect the city center with the suburb of Scandicci, where the novelist Ouida once lived, and which is now a glut of ugly apartment buildings. Such a tram the sophisticated tourist would be unlikely to take; as a rule he moves in more wholesome directions, out into Chianti,for example, or up to Fiesole or Settignano, where Michelangelo grew up. For the tourist, despite all his claims to want to see the ‘real Florence’, isn’t interested in its urban sprawl; he is interested in what Bernard Berenson called ‘conoscing’, the object of which is the discovery of unsuspected marvels. (The term derives from the Italian verb conoscere, ‘to know’.) He wants to bring home, if not photographic evidence, then at least the interior knowledge that he has partaken of all the marvels that Florence has to offer – as if that were possible in the course of a single human life.
    And what