The Nostalgia Package Tour (Jeanne In Firenze)

You can retrace the steps of Dante when you visit Florence, visiting his parish church, for example, where he spied Beatrice for the first time.

Me? I’m retracing MY steps as I walk through the streets of Florence. Steps I first took so many years ago. Nostalgia comes so naturally to me that I stumbled into a tiny piazza in Rome and stumbled back nearly 20 years to a weekend getaway to the Eternal City – my first with Il Nostro Inviato (also known as Someone). I looked up at the street sign – Piazza San Pantaleo – and my mind, photographic for things like street names and addresses and the dates that important moments happened – recalled instantly that we had stayed maybe two nights at a small pensione on the piazza.

My days in Florence are filled with what the Italians might call controlli. I’m monitoring the streets, the crowds of tourists, the number of restaurants (and gelaterie – there are so many now!), the exact locations of shops (the clothing shop Gerard has moved, ladies and gentlemen. So has Patrizia Pepe’s boutique), the routes of buses I used to take (you catch the No. 23 bus now in front of the station, not on the side) and so on.

I’m also monitoring what people say. As in, I'm eavesdropping. I’m swooning over the constant flow of Italian language in my ear. Finally, I’m once again surrounded by Italian, a scenario I find so inspiring, so fundamentally pleasing I wonder if they should prescribe it as therapy? Perhaps it would only work for me. Jeanne’s Therapy. But I suppose other people could get a prescription for French Therapy? Or Spanish Therapy?

(This is hardly a new discovery since I’ve long known that quite simply, I get my jollies hearing and speaking Italian. Spanish, too.)

Of course it helps to know what the Italians are saying when you eavesdrop. But not only. It helps if you can follow the peaks and valleys of the sing-song Florentine accent, through which the natives express a constant, often hilarious litany of slights, recriminations and general observations that there’s nothing that can be done about whatever problem is under discussion but oh what a mess things have become!

The Florentine patois seems perfectly attuned to bursts of desperation, expressed through comments like, “Dio buono, ragazzi!” (Good God!) and complaints of any kind, though mainly of the most pedestrian nature (a signora told me yesterday that she had been waiting 30 minutes for the No. 4 bus. I don’t belittle her complaint – the No. 4 bus jilted me, as well, because I wasn’t standing in the exact right spot).

And of course there are controlli of the most personal kind. My old apartment now has mosquito screens on the windows that I can see from the street. (I should say: Apartment No. 3 in Florence…I haven’t visited #1 or #2 yet. I did see #4. It’s a medieval tower in the center of the centro storico. So not much has changed, although they have cleaned up l’Arco di San Pierino where the Antico Noe sandwich shop is located. Exactly where did all the heroin addicts go?).

Today, the day stretches before me, and it promises to bring hundreds of small discoveries. I may even do something new (Museo Stibbert, anyone? Apparently the grounds of the museum constitute a gorgeous park, a stone’s throw from the center of Florence).

All I know is I’ve paid for the Nostalgia Package Tour. The “This Is Your Life” Full Immersion Tour. And the “Brush Up On Your Florentine Dialect” Tour.

Also the “Can I Really Be This Lucky?” tour. The answer to that last one is a resounding yes.