It’s one thirty in the morning of my first day in Florence. We are trying to lock the car. The car is a grey Renault Scenic that’s been wished on me by the hire car firm – I’m already planning to give it back as soon as possible. "We" is S and me.
The car and I already have a history, before S came. For the first twenty minutes of our acquaintance it sat stubbornly refusing to give up the secrets of its operation. I managed to unlock the doors but the boot stayed impregnable. It was after eleven at night (the plane was 6 hours late). I hadn’t thought to look for a handbook – the Fiat Punto I hired in February had had none.
I gave up and put my cases on the back seat. Next, found my way round the gears. OK. Now to start it. No key, just a card. I inserted it hopefully into a slot near the steering wheel. I was rewarded by an LCD dislay in Italian which included the word "Start". I pressed the button on the dashboard which also read "Start/Stop". Nothing happened.
Timing is everything with this car. You can’t rush it.
Finally it shuddered into life and I looked for the handbrake. In vain. There wasn’t one. This was a blow. How was I to make hill-starts? Hill-starts are my best subject when it comes to driving. I felt disempowered. But I edged out of the car-park and looked for the road to Porta Al Prato – eleven minutes away, according to the Internet information.
Now I realise the value of travelling with a companion. I need a navigator. I can’t read the directions and drive at the same time. And this is where my acquaintance with S begins. As I head back towards Forence, having driven some miles south down the autostrada in the wrong direction, S on his scooter draws alongside me while I pause indecisively at a junction on the almost empty A1. He’s observed my erratic progress down the highway and is in knight errant mode.
I have so much to thank S for. Having established that (1) I am English and (2) I am alone and (3) I need to get to a hotel near the Porta Al Prato (he corrects my pronunciation carefully) he tells me to follow him and we set off, through a maze of streets. We draw up in the street next to the one where the hotel should be and start circling round the block on the one-way system, looking for it. We park and take stock of the situation.
S speaks no English at all and relates his circumstances to me at length in strongly accented Italian, with charming smiles and a gentle politeness on his thin face that I can’t resist admiring, leaning through the open passenger-side window. He is also living in a hotel, he tells me, because he has quarrelled with his brother and has had to leave the family home. He works, mostly in the leather industry. It’s a hard life but he seems philosophical. He does mention that he’d like to visit England.
And now, here we are. We’ve found the hotel with difficulty – S has trundled my case up and down the street, insisting that it must be here, or there, or the other end – and we are, conversationally at least, almost on married terms – with S knowing best and me arguing (and in the end, both being right and both being wrong too).
Now we’ve found the hotel and parked in the street. We’re trying to lock the car. Every time we think we’ve done it, we try the handles of the doors to check, and find it unlocks itself again. This goes on for ten minutes.
It’s 1.30 am at least. We leave the car apparently locked (we dare not try the doors ) and find the hotel dark and closed. There is a notice, though, with a phone number for the night porter. S interprets it for me. I phone and the door is unlocked. S, behaving like a perfect gentleman, explains my circumstances and departs.
The night receptionist is all smiles, despite being woken up at this unearthly hour. He helps me to find the car again (I have forgotten exactly where we abandoned it, temporarily – it’s been a long day, after all) and leads me into the secure parking area of the hotel. I sink thankfully into bed at about 2.30am.
Florence 8th April 2008
It should be raining today but the internet is wrong, at least for the morning.
The first scooter comes past my window (three floors up but I might as well be under its wheels, it's so well defined) at 3.30. I've had about an hour's sleep. By 4.30 it sounds like a tank invasion outside, heavy vehicles trundling and roaring past – no hooting, though. This is not Naples.
At 6.30 I give up pretending to sleep and get up. The apartment is great. Spacious and everything the agancy promised. Except that it needs double-glazing.
At 8.30 I sally down to reception to negotiate for a quieter room. The hotel is full and two single rooms are out of commission because of a water leak. I resign myself to either another short sleep period tonight, or spending more money on another hotel because this one will charge me for two nights regardless.
I set off for the centre of Florence, a fifteen minute walk away, to visit the Duomo and other historic buildings that I last visited about ten years ago. There's a bus, number 17, the receptionist tells me, but I always walk if I can, because I more often come across things I'm not looking for then.
And so it turns out that as I take a turning down towards the Arno across a wide piazza I see a modern art exhibition of work by a Polynesian artist called Adi Da Samra, advertised on the wall of a Franciscan monastery, the Cenacolo di Ogonssanti..
I cross the square and investigate.
Led into a cool arched cloister I find myself in the presence of a beautiful fresco that I've never appreciated before this moment. It's in a long vaulted hall, the refectory of the monastery, which was built in 1290. The modern art lines the two long walls leading up to Ghirlandaio's "Last Supper". Though the modern artist's work, hanging along the walls leading up to the fresco, is brilliantly coloured and meticulously constructed, Ghirlandaio holds his own down all the centuries since 1448 when he painted this fresco. It runs the full length of the short wall at the end of the hall. The monks ate their dinners in the presence of Christ and his apostles.
I commit the faux-pas of allowing my camera to flash as I photograph it and am punished with what looks like the lifelong enmity of the guardian of the hall. She even objects when I sit down to draw it, briefly, until I am rescued by a pleasant colleague of hers who speaks (and probably is) perfect American. (Later she relents when I am speaking for a long time to the curator of the modern artist's work, and she brings us both four leaved clovers from a plant she has discovered in the cloister.)
I want to draw the fresco because it's so perfectly situated in its context. Framed by simple, elegant arches of white stucco, it echoes, imitates, plays with the real space around and outside it. The light, the perspective, the composition of the figures as they celebrate the last meal with their friend and leader Jesus, are so moving when you are actually there with the picture. The mystery of perspective and tonal trompe l'oeuil is parallel with the religious mystery that surrounds the subject, it seems to me.
Each of the figures has a distinct character, which I'm sure every observer has said before. And dominating the group is not Christ, but Judas Iscariot, the traitor, who sits as it were symbolically confronting Jesus from the other side of the table. His head is tilted up in interrogation and challenge, his beard pointing towards the leader's face. He is more in focus, more defined, than Jesus or any of the other disciples.
There is so much to say about this work, and I haven't time or space to write it now. I drew my sketch, which was even more difficult than I anticipated, then admired Adi Da Samra's art (genuinely because it really is stunning) and went out to continue my progress towards the Duomo. It started to rain, and I took this as my excuse for ducking into a little cafe and enjoying a really delicious plate of linguine, tomatoes and olives.
The Piazza del Duomo in Florence is an amazing place. I was last here ten years ago and it takes me aback as I round the last corner on the narrow streets leading up to it. I shall post some of my photos here when I get home and you will see how rich the architecture is. But you have to be actually surrounded by all that black and white marble, all the sharply defined windows and gables and pilasters and towers, the barley sugar stick twists of the pillars at the huge doorway, the profusion of architectural geometric forms, the huge rose window above the doorway and Brunelleschi's huge dome topping it off, with people like ants up there looking down from the gallery round the lantern - you have to be there to experience all the drama and richness of it.
By now you may be able to tell, I'm a big fan of the Duomo in Florence.
When I get there after lunch, the piazza is thronged with tourists, school parties and female beggars. The beggars are annoying and no-one seems to be giving them anything. I resort to saying "go and get a job" when they whine at me, but as the words for working and washing are only one syllable different from each other in Italian, I may have accidentally insulted one or two of them. They leave me alone after a while, anyway.
As the rain has stopped and there are queues to go inside the buildings, I decide to draw a sketch of the main entrance to the Duomo. There's nowhere to sit so I lean up against the railings round the Baptistry. As usual I've brought too small a sketchbook. My hand isn't very steady, the proportions go a little awry, but I'm soon engrossed and get the gist of it down on a double page. I'm seeing and understanding much more than my photos will give me, whatever the finished drawing is like.
After about two hours the skies open and a serious rainstorm begins. My cue to duck into a bar for cappucino and cake. I choose a seat overlooking an unusual, tilted view of the cathedral and start another drawing. The boy camerero (he looks like a painting of a naughty boy by Caravaggio but is probably about thirty) is chatting to four girls on the next table. He quickly knows their names, where they are from (Bari) and that they have lots in common with him.
All five take an interest in my drawings. When I show them the sketch of the temple of Hera at Paestum the waiter tells us that this is where he lives. He keeps such a straight face that later I'm still wondering if he really comes from Paestum.
The weather's clearing again but it's getting late. I walk on, to the huge piazza of Santa Croce, where I've been told there's an internet point. I take more photos - the enormous facade of the church, the statue of Dante Alghieri who was born in Florence. Then I go on to the banks of the River Arno.
Again I'm struck by the firmness and rigour of Tuscan architecture. Across the river are the solid rectangular blocks of palazzos and hotels, their carefully proportions rows of shuttered windows picked out in green and red-brown against the ochres of the stucco. Topped with shallow triangular prisms of roofs, they look as though not a millimeter should be changed, for the balance between positive and negative is perfect.
I can go across the Ponte Vecchia, with its gold and jewellery shops, to the Pitti Palace, or turn right and reach the Piazza della Signoria through the cloister of the Uffizi. I'm getting tired and dusk is falling, so I stay this side of the river and pass under the sombre windows of the dark grey Uffizi. There are still street traders on the steps, selling both originals and cheap prints (I bought one of each last time I was here). As usual, there's a chancer among them who tries to get himself invited for a drink with me, but it's all in fun and nobody loses face when I say "no".
A small glass of wine at the bar facing Michelangelo's statue of David costs 6 euros but it does come with nice nibbles - almost sandwiches - and olives and crisps.I sit there for some time, drawing the arcade that houses a range of statuary, all on violent themes. There's a rape, at least one killing, and Cellini's young Perseus holding up the dripping, writhing head of Medusa. Lions prowl the foot of the pillars.
The Rape of the Sabine by Gianbologna is particularly beautiful - composed like a pas-de-deux by ballet dancers. The woman is hoisted up high on the shoulder of the attacker, while her husband lies vanquished under his feet. Later, after i've bought a guidebook, I find out that the sculptor's original title for this piece was "The Three Ages". The "Rape of the Sabine" does seem a more appropriate title. I make a separate study of the sculpture as I sit nibbling and sipping my wine.
Dead on my feet, having survived the day on two or three hours' sleep and done five drawings, I fall into bed back at the hotel. I expect to be woken up again at 4am and I'm not surprised, this time, when the convoy of tanks rolls through.
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