Florence Read Free Page B

marvels there are! Astonishingly, Florence houses almost a fifth of the world’s art treasures. A fifth! A thorough Florentine itinerary takes in architecture, sculpture and painting, major museums (The Bargello and the Uffizi) as well as small ones (the Stibbert and the Horne), public buildings, palaces and innumerable churches, Botticellis and Leonardos and Michelangelos and Giottos and Masaccios and Beato Angelicos and Gozzolis and Pontormos and Donatellos … And even if you see all of these things, even if you stay inFlorence a year, or five years, there will still be something that you’ve missed, some remote church known only to the cognoscenti of conoscing, about which you will be informed only on the eve of your departure.
    Nineteenth-century travelers, who usually visited Florence for a month or even several months, were able to take things at a slower pace, to intersperse their art wanderings with tea and shopping and social calls. (William Dean Howells’s 1886 novel Indian Summer describes just such a Florentine ‘season’.) When Clara Schumann came to Florence in 1880, her hostess, Lisl von Herzogenberg, wrote to Brahms that in order to appreciate the city fully, more time would be required ‘than her round-ticket – awful invention – permits her …’ And yet her reaction to what she did see suggests that Madame Schumann might have been grateful for the round-trip ticket.
It has happened a couple of times that we found her sitting on her stool before a Signorelli or a Verrocchio looking very worried, rubbing her hands in fearful enthusiasm – she would not let herself be emotionally carried away or allow her soul, so capable of vibration, to stir.
    Soon, of course, the round-trip ticket would give way to even more awful inventions, such as the commercial airliner; as travel became easier, the length of the average visit to Florence would shrink, so that today the habit is to see the city in a few days or even a few hours. The result is an even more intense version of the sensory overload that Madame Schumann suffered. By 1989, Graziella Magherini, a psychiatrist working at the Santa Maria Nuova hospital, had observed so many cases of foreigners quite literally collapsing from too much art that she labelled the phenomenon ‘Stendhal’s Syndrome’, after an episode in the novelist’s diary in which he recalled suffering palpitations and a falling sensation during a visit to the basilica of Santa Croce in 1817. ‘J’étais déjà dans une sorte d’extase,’ Stendhal wrote, ‘par l’idée d’être à Florence, et le voisinage des grands hommes dont je venais de voir les tombeaux. Absorbé dans la contemplation de la beauté sublime, je la voyais de près, je la touchais pour ainsi dire. J’étais arrivé a ce point d’émotion où se rencontrent les sensations célestes données par les beaux-arts et les sentiments passionnés. En sortant de Santa Croce, j’avais un battement de coeur …; la vie était épuisée chez moi, je marchais avec la crainte de tomber.’
    It’s easy to understand how he felt. Especially for those of us inured to more banal provinces, the immanence of the old, the beautiful and the historic in almost every facet of quotidian life takes some getting used to. For example, when Mark and I first moved to Florence in the early nineteen nineties, we rented an apartment in a palazzo on Via dei Neri with a statue of Mercury in its foyer; a plaque posted on the façade of this building announced that here, in 1594, Ottavio Rinuccini – ‘letterato illustre e gentile poeta’ – had written La Dafne, a ‘pastoral fable’ that Jacopo Corsi and Jacopo Peri would soon transform into the world’s first opera. Under such circumstances, reality can start to seem like a guidebook, just as a terrace view that includes, among innumerable rooftops and green copper domes, the church of San Miniato al Monte, the Belvedere, and the hills of Chiantiacross the river, can start to seem