Two Tales of One City

Two Tales of One City

A few years ago, I attended a medical conference in Florence. One of the speakers was a professor from Harvard. She was beautifully presented: her hair was expensively curled back off her carefully made-up face; she wore what I took to be a designer suit. She smiled. “The last time I was here,” she revealed, “I was carrying a backpack, and I had two dollars in my pocket.” She paused. Briefly, she looked sad. Then she carried on and delivered an excellent presentation. I saw her again at the course dinner that evening. She seemed happy to be eating the fine Tuscan food. I didn’t get to talk to her: she was too busy networking with the people with whom she was likely to be collaborating on her next research project. I wondered what was going through her mind.

I too first visited Florence as a backpacker. A long time ago—9 October 1979. I have the date recorded in the diary I kept at the time. It was a quick visit, as were my visits to other places within Italy and around Europe. I was travelling on a two-month Eurailpass, the 1970s version of "the grand tour". This was a busy trip, packing in as many sights as I could manage. I concentrated on those places I could get to from the railway stations. I didn’t want to waste the money I had spent on unlimited train transport by stopping unnecessarily long in one location.

The first diary entry for Florence begins, "caught bus in wrong direction for youth hostel." Clearly a bad start. It doesn't appear to have got any easier from there. I recorded many other things that went wrong. I don't seem to have noticed that any of them were my fault. My further comments about the hostel, where I spent two nights, after I managed to find it, were not complimentary. My favourite word was "horrible". In my defence, I do admit to "feeling a bit tired".

I mention in my diary that the bus "travelled though busy streets" and "past some interesting buildings, including one with a large dome," but there is no other comment on the acclaimed Florentine architecture. The "famous shops" were pronounced by me to be "shiny and horrible." The Italians I described as "noisy, rude, and unhelpful," and I "felt like leaving Italy without seeing the sights." Luckily, I didn't.

I found time on that earlier visit in 1979 for one full day in Florence, mainly it seems to visit the art galleries. The twenty-six-year-old version of myself documented the Uffizi had "an impressive collection of Renaissance paintings." I listed the artists. I decided I liked the portraits. Some of da Vinci's best works were "closed for repair." More positively, in a museum around the corner, Michelangelo's David, I wrote, was "much larger than life, and well worth the visit."

On that first trip to Italy, after an earlier bad eating experience, in Bologna, on my way to Florence, where I claimed in my diary the date had been added in to the bill, I was "not keen to try another restaurant," but I had “a number of ice creams, and hunks of pizza for lunch and tea." At least the ice-cream, I had to admit, was very good—"a delicious preparation, in a range of flavours." I got out of the city as soon as I could on the morning train to Pisa. The rest of Italy, even once I had some sleep, seems to have gone little better.

Italy appears to have caught my attention for all the wrong reasons. Milan, I wrote was "a large unpleasant city." Venice's streets and canals I described as "confusing." Naples was "dirty." Saint Francis Basilica in Assisi I said was "a large squat building with an unimpressive painted chapel upstairs." The Coliseum was "not so interesting inside." Seeing the Vatican museums required "walking through a seemingly endless series of galleries, containing an extensive collection of objects" to get to the Sistine Chapel, which I decided was "gloomy." Yes, there was clearly something about Italy on that trip. Travelling there, for me at that time, was definitely not fun. Perhaps it was something about the trains. At one stage, I wrote, I was "thoroughly sick of the Italian railroads and Italians in general." I suspect the feeling was mutual.

Other places in Europe, I was pleased to find, when I did some further reading of my diary, were relatively unscathed by my caustic pen. The Grand Place in Brussels I thought was "fascinating." Notre Dame in Paris I described as "a beautifully proportioned and tastefully decorated building." The Prado in Madrid I decided held "an unbelievable series of great paintings." In Vienna I was "developing some appreciation of the Baroque style.” The Black Forest in Germany contained "picturesque valleys, densely wooded hills, and pretty villages with flowers and old houses." There was nothing like that about Florence in the diary.

Of course, in the meantime, Florence didn’t go away. I got to learn more in the years after my first visit about its notable citizens, especially its artists, and see more of their work. There has been at least one TV series on the Medici family, set in Florence, and another one is coming up. Over time, I came to consider myself lucky to have been there and to have seen the twentieth century version of the real thing. 

The idea of Florence has been immortalised in English literature. The Victorian poet Robert Browning lived there with his wife, Elizabeth. One of his most evocative poems, in which he takes the time to contemplate the nature of art, is based on the Florentine painter Fra Filippo Lippi. The British writer E.M. Forster chooses to open his novel A Room with a View in Florence. Travel writers too have had their turn. Jan Morris, perhaps better known for her work on Venice, lists Florence as one of her favourite cities. Frances Mayes, the author of Under the Tuscan Sun, who is now also, as it happens, an American university professor, has done her bit to publicise the place. The city of Florence, along with a few other famous cities in the world, has its own volume in both the Lonely Planet and the Insight guidebook series.

Florence has had its own great writers. Dante Alighieri, a native of the city, wrote the hugely influential Divine Comedy. The popularity of his work is credited with helping to establish the Tuscan dialect, not classical Latin, which was more widely spoken elsewhere in the world at the time, as the basis for the language of modern Italy. Not long afterwards, Niccolo Machiavelli, who also used the Tuscan dialect, wrote The Prince, a book of political philosophy that has captured the imagination of modern readers, and has influenced a range of world rulers.

One celebrated Italian writer we don’t always associate with Florence is Carlo Collodi, who lived there in the 1800s. He created the character of Pinocchio and told the story of his transformation from an inanimate puppet into a human child. I remember reading the book as a schoolboy, and later watching a film version with our own children, always feeling slightly sickened by the puppet’s continuing poor choices as he went through the process of growing up.

I too grew up. I think. I settled into my career. I married and had three children. All of them have travelled. Our oldest daughter spent time on her own in Italy, including Florence, which she says she loved, partly because of the favourable attentions of the Italian men, who she says were "very friendly" and would call out "ciao bella" whenever she passed. The same daughter later got the chance to study for a year in Paris. She was living on her own in an apartment near Montmartre. My wife and I worked on a plan to travel from New Zealand to Europe to help her with her homework. We looked out for a suitable event in a nearby country that I could attend as part of my work. The European Society of Endocrinology congress was to be held in Florence that year, which looked like the perfect opportunity, so I booked to attend.

We visited other places in Europe apart from Florence. We had a couple of days traipsing around the sights of Rome while we adjusted to the time difference. We went on from Florence to visit the family near Vienna that our other daughter had stayed with while at school there, and did a "Sound of Music" tour in Salzburg (something I would have been too embarrassed to do in my younger days), a couple of days walking near Zermatt, and an afternoon down by the lake at Lausanne. Then we met our "French" daughter in Dijon and had a few very enjoyable days with her in and around Paris. These were all places I had been to before and wanted to go back to. But it was the days in Florence that turned out to be the most different this time round.

We stayed at the Hotel Collodi—a small comfortable place close to the train station, and within walking distance of the conference. No buses. No youth hostel dormitories. The building in which the hotel was situated, it turned out, was not where the famous author Collodi had lived, but it was on the same street. There were statues of Pinocchio on the stairs. The two main staff members— Angelo and Maria—were big fans.

We had time on the day before the conference to explore the immediate neighbourhood. The famous Duomo cathedral, which I had ignored last time, apart from a quick glance from the bus, was only a few blocks away. Once we had unpacked, we set out through the busy streets. Even from a distance, the cathedral was more impressive than I had remembered. We decided to take the opportunity to look around inside.

As we approached via the Piazza del Duomo, we heard the haunting sounds of someone performing Francesco Sartori’s Con te Partirò: “Time to Say Goodbye”. It turned out to be a young woman playing classical guitar. “You made me cry,” I complained. She stopped and talked to us for a while, then played some other equally beautiful tunes. Her name was Justyna Maria Janickak. She was a musician from Poland, financing her travels around Europe by busking and selling CDs. We bought one called Guitar Sounds of Florence. Back in New Zealand, I believe, she would have been a major star.

We did see together the impressive interior of the cathedral. Most other sightseeing, I left to my wife. I experienced the pleasures of Tuscany vicariously through her stories in the evenings, usually spent together in little back-street restaurants, hearing her descriptions of where she had been.

One day, my wife travelled to nearby Pisa. Another day, she took a tour of some of the famous Tuscan vineyards and returned with two bottles of Chianti. Her most memorable visit was to the Galleria dell'Accademia, on a street near to our hotel, to see the statue of David. My wife, who is a massage therapist, and knows a thing or two about muscly bodies, declared it to be “the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.” Even though, as I reminded her, she has been married to me for more than thirty years. She said she spent part of that afternoon trying to find the perfect David barbecue apron for me but seems to have given up and came back with a leather handbag instead. Meanwhile, I was stuck at the conference.

          It was a huge event: thousands of people from dozens of countries. There was nobody really that I could talk to. Which was fine: I had come to listen. The international research and academic communities are highly competitive. People were huddled into small groups, earnestly discussing their latest publications. One conversation I did overhear was about a colleague who was obviously highly successful, and probably the envy of the others. “Oh no,” they said, about one of his discoveries. “He didn’t publish the results of that research; he sold them to a drug company.” Sometimes I would attempt to join a group of what looked to be more friendly and relaxed people, only to find that they were conversing in Swedish or Greek or some other language I didn't understand.

The official language of the conference was English, but that didn’t always guarantee intelligibility. When I was training in Dunedin, lectures about endocrinology topics, even from the best lecturers, were difficult to follow; in Florence, in a thick Czech accent, they were impossible. I looked in the programme for sessions presented by people from Britain or the USA or Canada or Australia—there was only one by a New Zealander. My strategy was not always helpful: I was surprised how many people from other countries doing research in the big English or American universities had such poor spoken English language skills.

More colourful than the delegates at the conference were the Africans who accosted us every day on the way in and out of the venue, selling souvenirs and fake designer goods, and other things we may or may not have needed. One day when it rained unexpectedly towards the end of the afternoon, we came out and they all had umbrellas to sell. Another time, one of them tried to sell me a "Rolex" watch for ten Euros. When I showed him that I already had a watch (not a Rolex), he offered to give me one for nothing, presumably intending to distract me by putting the watch on my wrist while I held out both hands and his friends searched my pockets. I declined his offer.

The official food was not great. At the start of each day, we were supplied with our “lunch”—a cardboard box containing a sandwich wrapped in plastic, a small tub of yoghurt, and maybe a muffin or a piece of fruit. On the last day, I found a stall where they were show-casing local produce. I spent some money on a “farmer’s sandwich”—delicious prosciutto in fresh Italian bread. I wished I had discovered it earlier. In other parts of the venue, there were huge queues, where beautiful young women, who looked like they might be Sophia Loren’s granddaughters, were serving free espresso coffees and delicate biscuits, sponsored by the big pharmaceutical companies.

I started to enjoy my walks between the conference and the hotel. Angelo or Maria would wish me a sincere bon giorno when I leftin the morning and welcome me back with a cherry buonasera when I returned in the afternoon. I picked out the perfect route through the back streets, where I could see ordinary Italians going about their lives, sipping their coffees (and smoking) in the mornings, and still engaged in earnest conversations (and smoking) in the afternoons. I marvelled at how long they lived, and how they found space to dry their washing and park their cars on the narrow streets.

There was one free day together after the conference to look at the sights. We queued for the Uffizi. There were more people than I remember from last time. Like the whole of our trip around Europe, once we got into the gallery, we were deliberately selective. The da Vincis were back—a whole room of them. It is difficult to describe pattern and colour in print, but I can say that they were worth the wait. Fra Filippo Lippi's Coronation of the Virgin was still there. It hadn't moved since my earlier visit. It probably hadn't moved since Robert Browning's time. Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, one of the word's more striking and influential artworks,was a favourite for selfies. The photos' modern human subjects were inevitably standing with their back to the famous painting. Some of them, I noticed, but not all, turned around afterwards to look at the picture.

Back outside, we strolled along the banks of the Arno and across the Ponte Vecchio. We had a picnic lunch in a leafy park, and an afternoon drink in a cafe on the Piazza della Republica. Up till now, we had ignored the signs to the market. It wasn't until we had checked out of the hotel, and were looking for a toilet, that we discovered it was a huge colourful indoor affair, selling a variety of Italian produce. We took some photos, stocked up on sandwich ingredients, and caught the overnight train to Vienna.

Obviously, we enjoyed out time in Florence. I am unable to explain why the comments in my diary about my earlier visit, which I re-read, possibly for the first time, while researching for this story, were so negative. It is not the way I remember it. In a 2013 assignment on my life as a doctor, I wrote of my time in Europe: "I was able to advance my understanding of culture, history, art and language." It could be that on that earlier visit I was feeling bad for other reasons. Possibly the Italians themselves had changed, or were treating me differently now that I was older, had more time, and more money. Conceivably, I just wrote my diary that way in those days because I thought it was more interesting to be critical.

All the same, I wish that somebody could have gone back, taken hold of my younger self, and told me that I should be more tolerant, better informed, more open to experience, and less willing to pass judgement. But probably, like Pinocchio, I just had to learn life's lessons for myself from my own perspective.

And the professor? Who knows? She was clearly very good at being an endocrinologist. Possibly she had also made a better job than I had of being a backpacker. Maybe she had enjoyed it more than I seem to have managed. With any luck, her older richer self would have found a different but equal enjoyment at visiting Florence again for the purpose of attending the conference. I hope so.