Italy Part 3: Florence

Florence, from San Miniato or thereabouts

Before this trip I hadn’t been to Florence for more than 20 years. I had memories of dark, narrow streets, and high, forbidding palazzo façades. Essentially, that’s what I found this time.

Florence was on the agenda because I had signed up to join a small watercolour tuition group travelling out from London. The plan was for seven of us, plus teacher, to stay in a villa between Florence and Fiesole, paint in the gardens at the villa and nearby during the mornings, touristificate in the afternoons, and meet for dinner back at the villa in the evenings. I hadn’t painted for over 50 years, and, sadly, I didn’t rediscover any particular talent now.

But the group was terrific company, all around the same age (late 60s/early 70s); Rea, our teacher, was endlessly optimistic; and the food, cooked by the villa owners, was fantastic. Not a dud menu in the whole week.

Our villa at Palmerino, between Florence and Fiesole. In fact, this is one of the minor buildings in the complex.

The villa was interesting – Il Palmerino, owned during the late 19^th/early 20^th centuries by one Violet Paget, one of those northern European, Italy-loving literati. Her pen name was Vernon Lee. According to John Pemble, she was given to ‘quivering effusions’ on Italian art (I don’t know, I haven’t read any of her stuff, and must). According to Wikipedia, she habitually dressed à la garçonne. She had a number of special lady friends, and Ethel Smyth describes the performance of one of them, Clementine ‘Kit’ Anstruther-Thompson as she approached a statue of Apollo in the Vatican: ‘In dead silence she advanced, then retreated, shaded her eyes, and finally ejaculated “Look at that Johnny! How he sings! How he sings!” ‘ I’m not sure who, or what gender, Johnny was, but you get the tone.

Vernon Lee’s now the subject of much academic beavering-away on both sides of the Atlantic. The Florence artistic/literary community of her era (they sound ghastly) would make the subject of a great film.

The garden of the Villa Peyron, where we went for a painting session.

So back to Florence. The weather was cold and grey initially, but cheered up. We covered several of the compulsory outdoor sites – Santa Croce, the Duomo, baptistry doors, Ponte Vecchio. We risked heart failure climbing to the Piazzale Michelangelo and the church of San Miato, and got the view that every visitor to Florence for the past six centuries has got, the subject of millions, even billions, of photographs. We took cabs to Fiesole, pretty enough it itself, with another great vista, this time more distant, and seen the other way, from the north.

The Roman theatre at Fiesole (which my computer keeps trying to correct to 'fissile').

Yes I admit it – when it comes to art galleries, my boredom threshold is low. Within five minutes, my feet hurt, my back aches, and I can’t decide which pair of glasses I should be wearing. I need to look at sights with a purpose in mind, and find it difficult (not impossible, but difficult) to appreciate art fully for its own sake. If I had to write a guidebook entry, say, I’d be forced to concentrate, and then I’d get more out of gazing at paintings. Perhaps an art history course, for which I had to write a few essays, could help.

But then, tourism isn’t conducive to art appreciation. The pressure to ‘do’ everything, to gawp for a few seconds and move on, is overwhelming. And we saw plenty of people doing just that. John Pemble writes of 19^th-century visitors, ‘Travellers with less than ordinary stamina were compelled to retire from the gruelling exercise overcome by frustration and fatigue.  “I am too old in head, limbs and eyesight for such hard work, such toiling and such straining”, moaned the sixty-seven-year-old William Wordsworth, turning homewards with an immense sense of relief.’  I’m sure many earnest pilgrims to Florence end up saying the same thing to themselves.

The main façade of the Duomo (cathedral) at Florence, and the campanile attributed to Giotto.  That of the main building dates back only as far as 1887 – the original was demolished in Renaissance times as 'outmoded', but it took several hundred years to replace it, due to squabbles and corruption. At least the two buildings match, reasonably.

 So the nearest thing to a ‘gallery’ that I went into was the San Marco museum, with its monkish cells and frescoes. To the extent that there was an art-historical theme to the trip, I guess it was frescoes. You can’t help admiring not only the result, but the skill of the artists in overcoming the technical challenges: they had to work fast, painting onto areas of plaster while it was still wet, section by section. How they achieved seamless, unified compositions I don’t know. Not all the Renaissance masters were great at anatomy though – there are plenty of weird body proportions, distorted limbs, and fingers like bananas. It’s not original to say that Michelangelo was in a class of his own, but even I can see that he was.

And of course there are tombs, funerary monuments and cemeteries, some of the most interesting features of any western city. The church of Santa Croce’s a five-star target for that alone, with tombs of and memorials to Michelangelo, Dante, Machiavelli, Marconi and more. Naturally, we tried to visit the English cemetery on the one day when it was closed.

Michelangelo's tomb, in the church of Santa Croce, Florence.

If you’ve seen the film of ‘A Room with a View’, you might expect the River Arno to be something special. Yes, well, maybe. The Ponte Vecchio is what it is, and the other bridges make a nice visual progression in a photograph, but this isn’t the Grand Canal in Venice, and I find even the view along the banks of the Tiber in Rome more interesting.

The Ponte Vecchio, over the River Arno. Well, it's a compulsory photo. Shortly after our visit, the pavement along the bank on the left collapsed into a great void, taking cars with it, as a result of flooding and consequent underground erosion.

After a week, it was time to head for the railway station and the train to Rome, a city I know rather better. And as a lover of cityscapes more than paintings, I was happy to be heading further south.