When I arrived back in Florence in 2015 after a ten-year hiatus, I felt overwhelmed by everything I saw, heard, thought, and did. Where overwhelmed is wonderful. Where overwhelmed means feeling alive -- finally, again, in a very particular way tied to walking around town and talking in Italian.
I was staying with friends just outside of centro, in an apartment building typical of blocks of flats in Italy, which is to say within close reach of lots and lots of people. The result was a thoroughly Italian experience even if I was not in walking distance of the Duomo. Here's what I noticed:
May 17, 2015
5:52 a.m.
My mind is already split in two between Italian and English.
Even in my dreams. As I walk about Florence and think about what I will tell
Alex about my trip so far or as I write in my journal, the sentences are all a
tangled mix of English and Italian. Già . Of course it’s not surprising. But it’s
still incredibly pleasant. Like diving in a pool for the first time in years,
and finding your body immediately bending toward the strokes once practiced so
regularly.
But wait...what woke me so early? Was it the conversation in mezzo alla
strada at 5:15 a.m.? The portone of the building closing again and again like a
giant hammer? Or was it the very determined mosquito?
AHHHH Italian apartment buildings!!!
Anyway I’m up … and done
battling the mosquito, done battling the infernal banging
of the door, di continuo…and my reward is I am working in one of the most
Italian of work spaces. Real Italian. A terrace that overlooks the inner
courtyard of a series of large apartment buildings in Vicky and Angelo’s
neighborhood. The wind is blowing good, there are lovely plants lovingly
cultivated by Vicky adorning the terrace and below evidence of some very
dedicated and talented gardeners who maintain pristine green spaces adjoining
the ground floor apartments. My hosts? They’re sleeping. And me, I’m with the
rondini circling over head and the breeze and these
tiny house plants.
If Hitchcock had filmed "Rear Window" in Florence … that’s what it’s like.
The birds are circling over head, like an avian air show. I’ve opened the
double doors of the kitchen in this real Italian apartment and I’m godendomi the
early morning birdsong and wind and the church bells but in a very unusual spot
for me…an apartment in periferia that as I've said gives onto a large inner
courtyard that provides an unusual greenspace for the residents (and their
visitors). You’re in nature but you’re not. The birds don’t seem to know the
difference – they are circling in a quantita’ mai vista prima…
One things I like about staying with these friends is it’s real. I
take the bus, I kvetch with the signoras at the fermata about how late the bus
is in coming and whether I could take instead the No. 8. You walk around the
nabe and it’s all real shops, frequented by actual Italians.
And it means you also have to deal with the Real Italy, of
annoying mosquitoes, loud conversations at all hours and a large apartment entrance (il portone) that’s more like a bludgeon than a door.
I’’m running from appt to appt and
making lots of acquisti. Walking the streets. It’s like I need to inspect every
street that’s important to me, and also glance at other streets I
don’t fully remember.
I feel an incredible
energy right now. Which makes no sense because I’ve slept no more than 5.5
hours a night since Tuesday. But I’m breathing in the air and walking miles and
miles each day and I have so many thoughts I don’t know where to turn.
I’m having thoughts I didn’t expect to have because I’m
having encounters I didn’t expect to have.
It’s so clear that Italy is a part of me. Just the
energy I feel, just the way I move through the streets so assuredly, as if I’ve
been living on the moon for 18 years and have just finally touched down on
earth again. Maybe it’s the walking. My earlier life, I walked everywhere in
Florence and I am used to the rhythm of walking, stopping to inspect a shop
window, then making some acquisti, then asking a question of a shop owner, then
waiting for the bus… (not much like shopping on Amazon).
It sounds crazy but it feels primal to me. Like, yes, this
is the way we live. How I live in Atlanta? No, that’s fake. That’s not a
natural rhythm because it’s not feeding your mind and your soul.
The constant encounters with people -- maybe that’s it. To
live, Italians must believe, you must be moving up against people and their expectations and their
problems all the time.
Everything about this terrace sums up Italy. I look across
the courtyard at another balcony where gorgeous pink flowers hang over the
railing, next to a stendipanni with women’s underwear hanging on a line. Fully
divine, fully human. Absolutely enchanting. I hear the terrace doors of other
apartments opening, the dark saracinesche on the windows coming up now that it's daytime, a woman bringing two turtles
out to the ground floor garden to roam around. You know, the usual. Then of
course she can be seen sweeping just inside the garden doors. Some of the
little squares of green belonging to the individual apartments are well-cultivated
and pristine, others weedy and perfunctory.
Now it’s 7 a.m., and the 7 o'clock church bells are ringing across the city. It’s a sunny,
cool Italian spring morning, and I’m on a tiny balcony, full of gorgeous little
flower pots, immersed in greenery as the Italians would say and yet in the
city, with a soundtrack of birds and church bells, and the faint banging of patio doors as middle-aged women come out to hang clothes on laundry
lines. I can hear a signora yelling at someone to wash his hands.
I try to
photograph the little patios with their plant displays, their picture-perfect
flowers, but nothing can duplicate what the human eye can see.
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