Educating alice, p.12
Educating Alice, page 12
Adrian then turned our attention to the huge Palazzo Strozzi across the piazza. “This palace was begun in the 1480s and completed in the 1600s. It is the most famous and largest in the city. In fact, it is so big it was never entirely completed. Inside there is a large walled garden area.” She pointed to the stone walls projecting from the ground level. “The Strozzi were private bankers, and the petitioners sat waiting on these stone walls outside the palace.” And in keeping with the zeitgeist of fifteenth-century Florence, this grandest of all palazzi went out of its way to avoid “envy” by using heavy rustication in its rough-hewn masonry façade.
Next, we were off to the nearby Piazza della Repubblica, a large square described in one of my guidebooks as “hideous” and “not loved by most Florentines.” Although it was only the end of May, the infamous summer heat had already settled into the Arno Valley. The unrelenting sun made walking even a short distance an act of valor; sitting and standing was only a little less daunting. Adrian, who was not immune to the heat, offered a suggestion as to how we might keep cool or, failing that, avoid having a heatstroke.
“Do we all agree we should stay in the shade and stop for cold drinks as much as possible during our walk?” she asked.
Right then and there I knew that Dr. Adrian Hoch was my kind of professor. I already liked her style. For one thing she did not have the annoying habit, as some instructors do, of cramming her students with information overload, although clearly she knew her stuff. Instead, Adrian made fifteenth-century Florence come alive by weaving together stories about the art and architecture and people who once inhabited a city that, for a period of time, was as great as any in history.
“This once was the site of the Roman forum,” Adrian said as we stood in the Piazza della Repubblica. “And later, from the middle 1500s through 1860, the ghetto bordered the square on its northern side.”
I interrupted Adrian to ask a question: Why does my guidebook describe the square as “not loved by most Florentines”?
“That's true,” she said, explaining that at one time this area had been a crowded, colorful neighborhood that included an artisans' center, the Jewish ghetto, the red-light district, and the Mercato Vecchio, a busy market center that for centuries attracted farmers and townspeople and traveling traders. Then in a burst of misguided urban improvement the entire area, along with a big chunk of Florentine history, was demolished in the late 1800s. In its place rose the sanitized, commercial Piazza della Repubblica, a square that instead of charm offered tourists a shopping area and two large noisy outdoor cafés.
Happy to leave the Piazza della Repubblica behind, Ilene and I sprinted after Adrian, who, although short and compact, walked at a fast clip. Over the next hour we worked our way through the city's historic center until we reached the Mount Everest of Florence: the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, or the Duomo, as it's commonly known. Famous for Brunelleschi's stupendous, physics-defying dome, the cathedral is one of the most-visited tourist attractions in Florence. In fact, the swarms of tourists, many of them young backpackers, seemed a permanent part of the structure. As they sat on the cathedral steps talking on cell phones, punching away at Palm Pilots, eating, sunbathing, and sleeping, they formed an obstacle course for anyone wanting to enter the cathedral. Permesso, permesso, permesso, the tourists whispered like a mantra, as they tried to avoid stepping on someone or something. But it wasn't just the tourists; a carnival atmosphere prevailed as vendors hawked T-shirts stenciled with an image of Michelangelo's David wearing sunglasses and artists tried to sell their wares by setting up easels near the horse-drawn carriages available to tourists. As Ilene and I followed Adrian through the crowds gathered around postcard stands and food kiosks, I listened with only half an ear. I was counting on learning about the Duomo in a more private tour later in the week.
More pleasant was the walk from the Duomo to the Piazza della Signoria, the square that for centuries served as the center for Florence's civic life. As we strolled in the shade along the narrow Via del Procon-solo, we passed small neighborhood markets and bakery shops, where people went about their daily errands. Inside one shop, I watched a woman select a loaf of coarse bread, ripe tomatoes, black olives, and red onions—perhaps for a lunch of pappa al pomodoro, a tomato-bread soup. On the narrow sidewalk a woman called out “Ciao, Natalia” to an acquaintance. The two women stopped and began an animated discussion. Chatting, laughing, gesturing, the women seemed oblivious to the pedestrians forced to step around them out into the oncoming traffic.
I tried to imagine a similar scene on a Paris street, but I couldn't. Yo u would never find Parisians blocking the sidewalk while chatting away; they preferred conducting their tête-à-têtes in crowded cafés while drinking an express. Still, it was one of the things I liked about the Italians: the way their familial approach extended to life in general, making the sidewalk part of their house and the stranger on the street part of their family.
As Adrian, Ilene, and I approached the Bargello Museum, the pleasant street began to branch out into some of the most tourist-clogged arteries in Florence. Then suddenly we were in the crowded Piazza della Signoria, a place that perhaps more than any other is the repository of Florentine history. We followed Adrian through the dizzying crowd of tour groups and schoolchildren to the shady Loggia della Signoria. As we stood in this elegant structure, which was built in the 1370s to provide a dignified setting for the city's elected officials to watch public events, Adrian gave us a fascinating historical overview of the famous Piazza della Signoria. As I listened to Adrian, the restless ghosts of past Florentines seemed to swirl about in the crowded square. Dante. Michelangelo. The Medicis. Vasari. And Savonarola, the fanatic monk who induced his followers to burn their worldly goods in the original Bonfire of Vanities and then was himself burned at the stake in this very square.
When we left the city's historic center to walk along the river Arno, it took a few minutes to leave behind the Medicis' world and adjust to contemporary Florence. I looked at my watch; it was twelve-thirty. Traffic on the streets was thinning out as shopkeepers and workers went home for their midday meal. Although Adrian still seemed as brisk and energetic as she had three hours earlier, Ilene and I were wilting. Ilene, of course, was entitled to wilt; she'd arrived in Florence only that morning and had come straight to class. Her plan, she said, was to go back to the hotel and sleep until our six o'clock lecture that evening. I liked Ilene. She was easygoing and laid-back, and she didn't ask Adrian a million questions about every detail of every place we visited. When she did ask a question, it was always an interesting one.
As the three of us were about to part, I asked Adrian if she knew anything about the Borgo Pinti.
“When I first moved to Florence, I lived there,” she said. Adrian, it turned out, was not British after all; she was an American who'd lived in Florence for about ten years. I wanted to ask her more about the Borgo Pinti, but I sensed Adrian preferred to keep her private life private. Besides, she seemed in a hurry to get to the library to work on a research paper.
That was okay with me; I had my own research project waiting. Although it was an unexpected digression that could turn the purpose of my trip on its head, my plan was to see what I could find out about the man I'd met a day earlier on Borgo Pinti.
But first I headed for Caffe Giacosa to have some lunch.
The accidental meeting that threatened to undercut my focus on Florentine art had happened on my second day in Florence. It was a Sunday, and I was having a hard time figuring out what to do. Sunday, in my opinion, is the trickiest day of the week for people traveling alone; for some reason, it seems to heighten the potential for loneliness. As a result I have learned from years of solo traveling to find creative solutions to the problem of Sunday. But on this particular Sunday morning I was striking out. Despite the stacks of brochures and calendars spread out before me I could find nothing open except all the usual suspects: the museums, churches, and historic monuments that would be even more crowded than on a weekday.
Just as I was about to give up and take a bus to the nearby town of Fiesole, a listing in one of the calendars caught my eye. The brief entry read: Bonsai and suiseki garden. Borgo Pinti, 74. Open every Sunday 9–13. Free. It sounded perfect. I looked in my guidebook to see if the garden was listed. It wasn't. But there was a small reference to Borgo Pinti: “The most attractive of the medieval streets in Florence is the Borgo Pinti, at the far end of Via degli Alfani. Tall, narrow, highly picturesque but faintly claustrophobic, it runs all the way from the northern gates to the Santa Croce quarter.”
I was both enchanted and puzzled by this description. I found myself picturing not a street but a person. He was tall and narrow and faintly claustrophobic. It sealed the deal; I had to go there. I drained the last drops of my cappuccino and headed for the concierge to ask directions.
“I have never heard of such a bonsai garden, but here is Borgo Pinti,” he said, circling on the map a long street in Santa Croce. “And I do not know the location of number 74 Borgo Pinti. But it would be my pleasure to call the telephone number to ask.”
After several attempts to get through, the concierge told me that yes, the garden would be open until one in the afternoon and that any taxi driver could take me there. “A ride of about ten minutes,” he added.
I hopped into a taxi and showed the driver in writing where I wanted to go, a trick learned in Kyoto. Then I leaned back and studied the route we were taking to Santa Croce, an old neighborhood that remained much the same as it was in the fifteenth century. At first glance, the long narrow streets with their stern rows of almost windowless houses seemed more boring than “highly picturesque.” At one point we passed the Regency Hotel, home to the annoying Mr. Simon Langford. Just to be on the safe side I ducked my head down below the taxi's windows. A few minutes later, we passed the hotel again. We seemed to be going around in circles.
“Scusi, dov'e Borgo Pinti?” I asked the driver, hoping that dov'e meant “where is?”
Fortunately the driver's English was better than my Italian. He told me he had been up the one-way Borgo Pinto twice but was unable to find the number 74 address. “I will ask the question of someone,” he said, pulling over to a well-dressed couple walking arm in arm along the street. They conversed in Italian, then the couple walked on.
“They say it is back that way, one block,” he said. “We must go round again.”
After looping back, the driver stopped in the middle of a long block lined with stone walls high enough to hide whatever was behind them.
“Number 74,” he said, pointing to a large gated door next to an intercom. I paid him and walked to the intercom to search for a name that might indicate a bonsai garden. There was nothing, only the names of private individuals. I walked up and down the block in the stifling noon heat, looking for another gate or sign that might lead me to the garden. Nothing. There was not even anyone to ask; the street seemed deserted. In desperation, I pushed one of the buttons on the intercom. No reply.
Off in the distance, about two blocks down the street, a small group of people had gathered outside a building. I headed toward them, walking between the tall blank stone façades that lined the street and blocked out most of the sun in a city that sweltered in summer. Oh well, I thought, at least it's cool on the “tall, narrow, faintly claustrophobic” Borgo Pinti, a description that now seemed perfect. I stopped at the double-gated carriage entry, where a group of people stood chatting in Italian. Inside I saw people walking through the covered entry into a courtyard, beyond which was a large garden. From a nearby desk I picked up a brochure and read: “Cortili e Giardini Aperti.” In what seemed a genuine miracle I knew what each word meant: “Courtyards and Garden Open.”
An Italian man sitting behind the desk asked me, in English, if I needed help. I replied that I was curious about what was going on.
“Ah, you are very lucky, Signora,” he said, explaining that each year, for only two days, selected palazzi and their gardens were opened to the public for a fee—the money going to a historic preservation fund. I purchased a ticket, one that allowed me to enter all of the properties listed on an accompanying map. Several of the palazzi were located on Borgo Pinti, including the Palazzo Ximenes Panciatichi, the house where I now stood.
“This estate was bought by Giuliano and Antonio da Sangallo around 1490 and was decorated with paintings by Botticelli and Pollaiolo,” said the man who sold me the ticket. “It was remodeled in 1603, and in 1796, Napoleon spent most of the month of June here.”
As visions of Botticelli in the living room and Napoleon in the bedroom collided in my head, I stepped out into a garden the size of a small park, then turned around to look back at the house. It was surprisingly spacious, a well-proportioned house whose ochre-yellow façade was interrupted by large windows with faded blue shutters. The size and depth of the property astonished me. From the front I would have guessed it was a small row house, like the others on the street. But perhaps they too were as deceptive in appearance as this palazzo.
The garden had several parts. Directly behind the house was a parklike area where chairs were placed in the shade of large old trees. A woman and two children sat under one of the trees, talking, just as the original owners might once have done. A bird sang out; a church bell tolled the hour, and somewhere a child laughed. I moved from the little park to follow one of the gravel paths that disappeared around a bend. It wound around and around between walls of greenery. I passed a marble table built into a little alcove of rustic stone walls and entered a gravel courtyard circled by huge terra-cotta pots of lemon trees, their scent mingling with the warm air.
It was hard to tear myself away from the perfection of Palazzo Ximenes Panciatichi—despite its unpronounceable name—but the lure of palazzi yet to be visited drove me forward. I didn't want to miss anything since it was unlikely I'd ever have such an opportunity again.
It was about a five-minute walk along the Borgo Pinti to Palazzo Roffia. I had been told by the man at the desk that the Roffia family, who owned the palace from 1646 to the end of the century, had commissioned a skilled architect to design it. “It is considered a rare and important example of Florentine architecture from the end of the seventeenth century,” he said.
The façade of Palazzo Roffia was more elegant and original than most of the houses along the street. From the entrance door I walked through a long hall that ended in a cool, shady garden. Again I was startled by how large the house and grounds were. It was like opening a plain cardboard box and finding a Fabergé egg inside.
When I stepped into the garden, what I saw astonished me. Straight ahead, balanced on top of a ladder propped against a tall tree, was a gorgeous painting of a cathedral dome, perhaps the Duomo itself. To the left, farther back in the garden, a painting of cool white columns next to a red tree was perched on top of old bricks turned a rusty pink color. And to my right, another painting, one of flowers blooming, stood next to an old pewter urn. The garden was dotted with paintings, which blossomed like flowers planted by a gardener with an exquisite and subtle sense of color and design. I had never seen anything like it.
I approached a woman standing under the loggia who seemed to be in charge and asked if she had any information about the art. As I suspected, the paintings had all been done by the same artist and were for sale.
Immediately, I imagined the painting of the cathedral dome in my garden, leaning against my crape myrtle tree, the rusty pink cathedral dome shaded under a canopy of deep pink blossoms. For one wild moment I was tempted to ask the price. But I didn't. When it came to buying art I didn't trust myself to do the prudent thing. Instead, I thanked the Signora in charge and left. But not before committing to memory every detail of this garden that I could visit, like Brigadoon, for only one day. And I, through a series of wildly random choices, was lucky enough to have stumbled across it.
On my way to the next palazzo I passed a large open gate. Inside I could see a perfect square of lush grass bordered by pristine columns; at the far end of the square the columns arched high above the entrance of a church. Intrigued, I stopped to read the information on the bronze plaque near the gate: Church of Santa Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi. Founded in 1257. In 1493–96 Perugino frescoed the Chapter Room with the‘Crucifixion.'”
As I read this a sudden rush of blood made the skin on my face tingle, the way it always did when some half-hidden memory was trying to erase the fragile line between now and then. What seemed to be the trigger for this detour from the present were the words “Perugino” and “Crucifixion;” they suddenly seemed as familiar to me as the names “Rapunzel” or “Cinderella.” And then it happened: I slipped through the imaginary line between past and present, like a diver leaving the air and entering the water. In this case, the water was my Sunday school class, an event Mother never allowed me to miss, despite my repertoire of elaborate excuses.
It was there in a Methodist church—although we weren't Methodists— that I first met Perugino and his fellow artists, Raphael and Fra Angelico. To my surprise, Sunday school class had turned out to be more about art than about religion. We studied glossy magazine pictures pasted on cardboard backing of the Madonna, the Madonna with Child, Christ on the Cross. The various Madonnas always went by in a blur, but for some reason I was drawn to a picture of the crucifixion by an artist with the funny-sounding name, Perugino. I found the idea of being nailed to a cross—coupled with my Sunday school teacher's way-too-graphic description of the event—so terrifying that avoiding such a fate became a part-time obsession of mine. It immediately replaced my obsession of the prior year: worrying about being burned at the stake like Joan of Arc.
Now here on Borgo Pinti, light-years away from Sunday school and its cutout magazine pictures, I stood less than a minute's walk from the real thing. Suddenly the day had the feel of an adventure, one that now invited me to confront in the flesh, so to speak, Perugino's masterpiece. I stepped through the gate and hurried inside.
