PWAC Victoria: Jeff Bateman, Writing Sample

The Reading Room

The Firenze File

by Jeff Bateman © 2002

The crowds are gone, the lines are short and the food and art are still fabulous. Florence in the fall is the romantic, old-world Italy of your dreams. Published in Travel Etc., Winter 2002

Buon giorno from Florence. I'm on the open-air observation deck of the Duomo, the fourth largest cathedral in Europe, settling in to catch the sunset. The views stretch for miles up here atop the church's famous red-brick dome, some 300 feet above a dense maze of cobblestone streets and medieval town squares. The reason I'm slumped against a stone buttress and nursing on a bottle of mineral water is that I'm frankly a little whacked. For five days I've been hoofing it through the birthplace of the Renaissance, that historically momentous shift in the arts and sciences that effectively ended the dark ages and ushered in the modern world. I've loitered for hours in front of celebrated works of art from a litany of tongue-tripping names familiar to Sister Wendy fans the world over. I've walked miles of overwhelmingly scenic streetscapes. I've window shopped at Gucci and Versace, sampled eight flavors of gelato and dipped a blistered toe in the Arno River. To cap it off, I've just climbed a vertiginous 467 steps up an exceedingly tight and dank stone staircase to reach my seat among the pigeons. Now I intend to scribble a few postcards home while bathing in the same golden Florentine light that illuminates many of the masterpieces I've seen in the last week.

It's late October. My assignment has been to find out whether the off-season Florence treats its visitors any more kindly than during the tourist trade's extra-busy summer months. Not having been here in the summer, or ever before for that matter, I can't provide a direct comparison. But the city's reputation proceeds it: Too crowded, too touristy, too many exasperating, multi-hour line-ups. The intense summer temperatures, meanwhile, are the reason God invented Tuscany, that bucolic land of villas and vineyards to which the locals retreat during the thick of the August heat. That many merchants close up shop and join the exodus when the tourist revenue is still peaking says as much about the persistence of tradition hereabouts as the proud and uncompromising Florentine character.

Looking out over a sea of red-tile roofs, it's easy to distinguish guidebook Florence from the urban sprawl beyond. The Duomo is the geographic heart of what's known as the Centro Storico, action central in terms of the key attractions, shops and walkabouts. Far to the east one can trace the Arno as it descends from the hills and begins to s-curve its way to the Mediterranean. Hugging a stretch of the river eight blocks south is the confluence of mercantile wealth and power embodied by the Palazzo Vecchio (the city's town hall since the 1300s), the Uffizi Museum and the famous gabled bridge known as the Ponte Vecchio, home for five centuries to goldsmiths, jewelers and young lovers. Just across the river is the Pitti Palace, the massive 16th-century residence of the dynastic Medici family. To the west is the train station and the quaint Amerigo Vespucci airport, gateways for the 8 million people who visit Firenze (as the Italians call it) annually. That there's only a few dozen of us here atop the Duomo suggests the "off-season is the best season" theory might just hold water.

Inside Florence

Reserved tickets for the Uffizi and other Florence museums are available by calling 055-294-883. For anglophones who want insights into the political and sports stories generating such heated conversations in the bars, check the International Herald Tribune for its Italy Daily supplement. The many guidebooks are loaded with details on hotels, restaurants and attractions, but the best up-to-the-minute city guide is Florence in Your Pocket, a monthly magazine available in select hotels and restaurants. An understaffed city information center (Borgo Santa Croce 29r) near the train station is useful for brochures on cultural events and festivals.

Rain, now that we're on the subject, is one reason the autumn is downtime here. Traditionally it falls in quantity, swelling the notoriously volatile Arno and cueing civic disasters like the Nov. 4, 1966 flood that devastated the old town. Apart from one violent overnight thunderstorm, however, the conditions are perfect the week I'm here: cool mornings, shirtsleeve afternoons in the mid-70s and pleasant evenings that allow one to dine al fresco in what I'm told are relatively underpopulated trattorias and restorantes. The locals chalk it up to global climate change and worry, for once, that the river's too low. For those who like to explore backroads and soak up the local color, the sun and blue skies are a bonus. Yet even if it had been damp, there's no shortage of refuges where one can stay dry and sensually engaged, whether that be lingering in a wine bar over a glass of chianti or staring in mute appreciation at another towering achievement in Renaissance art and architecture--the lavishly decorated private rooms and public salons of the Palazzo Vecchio, say, or the white marble tombs of homeboys Michelangelo, Galileo and Dante in the gothic church of Santa Croce.

The Duomo, a Roman Catholic superdome of sorts that fills an entire city block, was prominent on my must-see list. Given my off-season mandate, though, I devote much of my first day to the Galleria delgi Uffizi, storehouse of more Renaissance masterworks than you can shake a Baedeker at. I had been warned and cautioned about the Uffizi in particular: Beware the serpentine line-ups that can last for three hours or more. Don't dare go in the mornings when the tour groups arrive en masse. Use the telephone booking system and order tickets months ahead. Nonetheless, after breakfasting in a pasticceria on a cappuccino and flaky brioche, I find myself marching towards the museum without a reservation and braced for whatever tedious fate the Roman gods have in store for the willfully naive tourist. My reasoning: If off-season here is to have its advantages, it will be measured primarily by the ease of access to the great sights.

The Piazza della Signoria, the vast public square that fronts on the museum, is suspiciously busy for 10:30 a.m. on a fall morning. Excited packs of tourists cluster around their digital cameras. Art students sit on stone steps while sketching the Palazzo Vecchio's Campanile (clock tower). The metropolitan police distribute free maps to the lost and confused, while their gun-toting colleagues in the carabinieri prowl the grounds as they've done since the Mafia set off a bomb here in 1993. One good omen: Nobody's lined up outside the museum except the street performers, spraypainted silver and springing to life whenever a coin is tossed their way. Inside I join what looks like a short cue. A digital sign, however, informs me that the wait will be 45 minutes. So it goes in an exhibit space that holds just 780 slow-shuffling patrons at a time. I eavesdrop on conversations in French, German, Italian and Californian before starting one of my own with an elderly couple from London. Having honeymooned here in their youth and returned a half-dozen times since, they confirm that the crowds of summer are frightful compared to the relative serenity of spring and fall. Queen Victoria, no less, apparently felt much the same about her favorite Italian getaway.

Once inside the Uffizi proper, I'm faced with a staggering array of gold-leaf treasures housed in a warren of small rooms. As I'll later discover at the Bargello (line-up wait: 15 minutes), the Galleria dell'Accademia (22 minutes) and the Palazzo Medici Riccardi (60 seconds), the museum experience in Florence is like biting into a triple-decker cream pastry of the sort served in cakeshops around town: A little goes a long way. I wander awestruck through the initial half-dozen rooms devoted to such Byzantine and early Renaissance masters as Giotto, Cimabue and Filippo Lippi before sinking onto a bench and spending a half-hour with Sandro Botticelli's Primavera and The Birth of Venus, the Uffizi's two best-known holdings. From there I tag along with a group of American students led by a bespectacled Florentine academic. She devotes particular attention to the Baptism of Christ, a circa 1470 painting attributed to Verrocchio but featuring an exquisite angel drawn by one of his apprentices, the 18-year-old Leonardo da Vinci. That a student could so clearly surpass the teacher is an irony much-appreciated by her audience. After two hours I've seen just half of the museum, so I retire to its scenic terrace restaurant, lunch on a shrimp panini sandwich and make plans for a second visit. (This time with a pre-booked ticket that, for the added cost of a minor service fee, allows me to waltz right in ahead of a half-hour line).

It's recommended that Florence is best tackled by dividing it into quadrants and devoting extended periods to each cluster of sights. My rather more haphazard approach involves rambling with a good map and two guidebooks at hand (the visually appealing Dorling Kindersley Travel Guide and the more academic Blue Guide to Florence, both available at Feltrinelli International, the prime English-language bookstore). Automobiles are barred from much of the old town, so it's ideal for long and mostly carefree walks. The one cautionary noise is the waspish buzz of the motor scooter. Throughout the city, swarms of helmeted Vespa, Piaggio and Suzuki riders engage in a kamikaze dance with the micro-sized autos and three-wheeled transport trucks clogging the streets. In the Centro Storico, however, the scooter is king and one quickly learns to step lively whenever one approaches. The ambulances lined up at the foot of the Duomo deal with an average of five pedestrian accidents a day, one attendant tells me in fractured English.

Surviving intact is a must if you hope to enjoy Tuscany's legendary cuisine. An early morning visit to the Mercato Centrale in the San Lorenzo district allows me to browse with the locals as they stock up on meats, pesche (fish) and produce. The market smells both foul (i.e., the yellowing rows of roosters hanging limply from steel hooks) and wonderful (the barrels of dried spices and fresh herbs). It also fairly reeks with old-world atmosphere: farmhands fresh from the fields recharge themselves with plates of thick sausages and bottles of Moretti beer; transistor radios blare Euro pop trifles; and white-haired ladies in black dresses stagger by with huge wheels of bread. The serious wrangling is conducted over aromatic heaps of mushrooms that are in their prime at this time of year. These funghi--chanterelles, morels, prized truffles worth their weight in gold--are staples in many of the deliciously simple pasta dishes listed on restaurant fresh sheets. Outside the market building, the haggling continues as bargain-hunters match wits with Florence's largest concentration of street merchants. Northern Italian leather goods (gloves, handbags, coats, briefcases) are dominant, but there's also souvenir T-shirts galore, fur-fringed denim jackets and soccer jerseys emblazoned with names like Ronaldo, Roberto Baggio and the Argentine Gabriel Batistuta, a local hero when he played for the home team Fiorentina.

Prices (in easy-to-calculate Euros now that the lira was retired in February 2002) skyrocket in the high-end shops clustered between the Ponte Vecchio and the Via de' Tornabuoni, site of Salvatore Ferragamo's shoe and fashion superstore. People-watching, I decide, is cheaper and more entertaining. My discrete voyeurism leaves me with a wealth of impressions: The olive-skinned child staring transfixed at a pair of puppets manipulated by a dapper showman in a felt fedora. The tonsured priest humming a show tune while sweeping the crypt at Santa Maria Novella. The willowy blonde at the Boboli Gardens who could be the lead in a Lina Wertmuller film. Old and young are equally stylish in their way, and the pace with which people stride about is surely a by-product of heavy espresso consumption. The men dress sharp from the feet up. The women favor chunky gold jewelry and black boots. From time to time I do a double-take upon seeing a hawk-nosed Roman profile that seemingly stepped straight from one of the canvases painted five centuries ago by Giozzoli, della Robbia and the rest.

Back here at the Duomo, the sun has slipped below a rose-hued band of clouds in the southwest. Making my way down to terra firma, I pause on the catwalk that circles Vasari's enormous 15th-century fresco of the afterlife painted on the inside of the dome. A security guard tells me the steady flow of foot traffic here normally precludes any extended appreciation of the artist's take on heaven, purgatory and the hell realms. It's October, though, so I'm free to examine at length the painfully creative ways in which Vasari's hyrda-headed demons torture those who've fallen from grace. Or, to frame it in modern terms, the metaphorical fate that befalls those who travel here at much busier times than this. Even in an all-season city like Florence, it's still better without the madding crowds.

Jeff Bateman
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Last updated: August 10, 2003 http://www.islandnet.com/pwacvic/batemn07.html