The Stones of Florence (3 page)

All summer long, or as long as the tourist season lasts, the
‘Cronaca di Firenze’
or city news of the
Nazione,
that excellent morning newspaper, is a daily chronicle of disaster to foreigners, mixed in with a few purely local thefts, frauds, automobile accidents, marital quarrels, and appeals for the preservation of monuments. The newspaper deplores the Florentine thieves, who are giving the city a bad name, like the noisemakers (
i selvaggi
). It seeks to promote in its readers a greater understanding of the foreigner, a greater sympathy with his eating habits, his manner of dress, and so on. Yet an undertone of irony, typically Florentine, accompanies this official effort; it is the foreigners with their cameras and wads of currency who appear to be the ‘savages’, and the thieves who are behaving naturally. A series of ‘sympathetic’ articles on tourism was illustrated with decidedly unsympathetic photographs, showing touristic groups masticating spaghetti, tourists entering the Uffizi naked to the waist.

On the street, the Florentines do not like to give directions; if you are lost, you had better ask a policeman. Unlike the Venetians, the Florentines will never volunteer to show a sight to a passing stranger. They do not care to exhibit their city; the monuments are there—let the foreigners find them. Nor is this a sign of indifference, but of a peculiar pride and dignity. Florentine sacristans can never be found to turn on the lights to illuminate a fresco or an altar painting; they do not seem to take an interest in the tip. Around the Masolino-Masaccio-Filippino Lippi frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine, small groups of tourists wait, uneasily whispering; they try to find the lights for themselves; they try looking for someone in the sacristy. Finally a passing priest flicks on the electricity and hurries off, his robes flying. The same thing happens with the Ghirlandaio frescoes in Santa Trinita. Far from hovering, as the normal sacristan does, in ambush, waiting to expound the paintings, the Florentine sacristan does not make himself manifest until just before closing time, at midday, when he becomes very active, shooing people out of the church with shrill whistles and threatening gestures of his broom. If there are postcards for sale in a church, there is usually nobody to sell them.

This lack of co-operative spirit, this absence, this preoccupation, comes, after a time, and if you are not in a hurry, to seem one of the blessings of Florence, to make it, even, a hallowed place. This is one of the few cities where it is possible to loiter, undisturbed, in the churches, looking at the works of art. After the din outside, the churches are extraordinarily peaceful, so that you walk about on tiptoe, fearful of breaking the silence, of distracting the few old women, dimly seen, from their prayers. You can pass an hour, two hours, in the great churches of Brunelleschi—Santo Spirito and San Lorenzo—and no one will speak to you or pay you any heed. Touristic parties with guides do not penetrate here; they go instead to the Medici Chapels, to see the Michelangelos. The smaller churches—Santa Trinita, Santa Felicita, Ognissanti, Santissima Annunziata, Santa Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi, San Giovannino dei Cavalieri—are rarely visited; neither is the Pazzi Chapel in the court of Santa Croce, and the wonderful Giottos, freshly restored, in the Bardi Chapel of Santa Croce, still surrounded by a shaky scaffold, are seen only by art critics, their families and friends. San Miniato, on its hill, is too far away for most tourists; it is the church that, as they say, they missed. And the big churches of the preaching orders, Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce, and the still bigger Duomo, where Savonarola delivered sermons to audiences of ten thousand swallow up touristic parties, leaving hardly a trace. The tourists then complain of feeling ‘dwarfed’ by this architecture. They find it ‘cold’, unwelcoming.

As for the museums, they are the worst-organized, the worst-hung in Italy—a scandal, as the Florentines say themselves, with a certain civic pride. The exception, the new museum that has been opened in the old Fort of the Belvedere, with pale walls, wide views, cool rooms, sparsely hung, immediately became a subject of controversy, as did the new rooms of the Uffizi, which were held to be too white and uncluttered.

In the streets, the famous parti-coloured monuments in geometric designs—the Baptistery, Giotto’s bell tower, the Duomo, the façade of Santa Maria Novella—are covered with grime and weather stains. The Duomo and the Bell Tower are finally getting a bath, but this is a tedious process that has been going on for years; by the time the Duomo’s front is washed, the back will be dirty again. Meanwhile, the green, white, and pink marbles stand in scaffolding, while the traffic whizzes around them. The Badia, the old Benedictine abbey, where the Good Margrave, Ugo of Tuscany (Dante’s
‘gran barone’
) lies buried and which has now been partly incorporated into the police station, is leaking so badly that on a rainy Sunday parishioners of the Badia church have had to hear mass with their umbrellas up; it was here that Dante used to see Beatrice at mass. Among the historic palaces that remain in private hands, many, like Palazzo Bartolini Salimbeni, are literally falling to pieces. The city has no money to undertake repairs; the Soprintendenza delle Belle Arti has no money; private owners say they have no money.

Historic Florence is an incubus on its present population. It is like a vast piece of family property whose upkeep is too much for the heirs, who nevertheless find themselves criticized by strangers for letting the old place go to rack and ruin. History, in Venice, has been transmuted into legend; in Rome, the Eternal City, history is an everlasting present, an orderly perspective of arches receding from popes to Caesars with the papacy guaranteeing permanence and framing the vista of the future—decay being but an aspect of time’s grandeur. If St Peter’s were permitted to fall to pieces, it would still inspire awe, as the Forum does, while the dilapidation of Venetian palaces, reflected in lapping waters, is part of the Venetian myth, celebrated already by Guardi and Bellotto in the eighteenth century. Rome had Piranesi; Naples had Salvatore Rosa; but Florentine decay, in the Mercato Vecchio and the crooked byways of the Ghetto (now all destroyed and replaced by the Piazza della Repubblica), inspired only bad nineteenth-century water-colourists, whose work is preserved, not in art galleries, but in the topographical museum under the title of
‘Firenze Come Era’
(‘Florence as It Was’). History, for Florence, is neither a legend nor eternity, but a massive weight of rough building stone demanding continual repairs, pressing on the modern city like a debt, blocking progress.

This was a city of progress. Nothing could be more un-Florentine, indeed more anti-Florentine, than the protective custody exercised by its foreign residents, most of whom have abandoned the city today, offended by the Vespas, the automobile horns, the Communists, and the rise in the cost of living. Milanese businessmen are moving into their villas and installing new tiled bathrooms with coloured bathtubs and toilet seats, linoleum and plastics in the kitchen, television sets and bars. These Milanesi are not popular; they too are
‘selvaggi’,
like their Lombard predecessors who descended on Tuscany in the sixth century to brutalize and despoil it. Yet these periodic invasions belong to Florentine life, which is penetrated by the new and transforms it into something newer. Florence has always been a city of extremes, hot in the summer, cold in the winter, traditionally committed to advance, to modernism, yet containing backward elements narrow as its streets, cramped, stony, recalcitrant. It was the city where during the last war individual Fascists still held out fanatically after the city was taken by the Allies, and kept shooting as if for sport from the roof tops and loggias at citizens in the streets below. Throughout the Mussolini period, the Fascists in Florence had been the most violent and dangerous in Italy; at the same time, Florence had been the intellectual centre of anti-Fascism, and during the Resistance, the city as a whole ‘redeemed itself’ by a series of heroic exploits. The peasants of the
contado
showed a fantastic bravery in hiding enemies of the regime, and in the city many intellectuals and a few aristocrats risked their lives with great hardihood for the Resistance network. Florence, in short, was split, as it had always been, between the best and the worst. Even the Germans here were divided into two kinds. While the S.S. was torturing victims in a house on Via Bolognese (a nineteenth-century upper-middle-class ‘residential’ district), across the city, on the old Piazza Santo Spirito, near Brunelleschi’s church, the German Institute was hiding anti-Nazis in its library of reference works on Florentine art and culture. The chief arm of the S.S. was a Florentine devil strangely named ‘Carità’, who acted as both informer and torturer; against the S.S., the chief defence was the German consul, who used his official position to save people who had been denounced. After the Liberation, the consul was given the freedom of the city, in recognition of the risky work he had done. Such divisions, such extremism, such contrasts are
Firenze Come Era—
a terrible city, in many ways, uncomfortable and dangerous to live in, a city of drama, argument, and struggle.

*
Nevertheless, finally an ordinance
was
passed by the municipality, setting a curfew of 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. on the use of motor scooters in the city’s centre.

*
The palace has since been restored.

Chapter Two

C
ATILINE, FLEEING FROM ROME
, came to Etruria, to the ancient hill town of Fiesole, where he and his fellow-conspirators found a ready welcome among the dissatisfied townspeople. In the old Etruscan stronghold, he proclaimed himself consul and assumed the consular dress. A Roman expedition was sent against him and the people of Fiesole. It was a noble Roman warrior called Fiorino who led the attack against Fiesole, which was too well defended, however, to be taken by assault. Fiorino, perceiving this, built a camp at the ford on the Arno where Florence now is and where the Fiesole people used to come every week to market. Fiorino was killed during a surprise night sortie from Fiesole. Caesar arrived with reinforcements and started to build a city. Fiesole was taken and destroyed. Catiline and his partisans escaped into the Pistoiese hills, where they were hunted down by the legions and slain in the great battle of Pistoria.

This account of the founding of the city, given by the old chroniclers, is a curious mixture of myths and actual history. Caesar never fought in Tuscany, but Catiline was in Fiesole, and there was a famous battle of Pistoria in which he perished. Fiorino, the eponymous hero, was a literary invention, on the pattern of Romulus, but there w
as
an Etruscan ford and market on the Arno, near Ponte Vecchio, at the narrowest point of the river, and Caesar, in a sense,
was
the founder of the city, which was resettled by his veterans, on the site of an Italic town, under the agrarian laws he sponsored. Even the date is not far off; the battle of Pistoria, which gives the time of the legendary foundation, took place in 62 B.C.; the agrarian laws were put into effect in 59 B.C.

Roman Florence had baths, temples, a forum, where the Piazza della Repubblica is now, a Capitol or a great temple to Jupiter with a marble staircase leading up to it, an aqueduct, and a theatre, all of which have vanished, leaving a few street names as markers: Via delle Terme or Street of the Baths, Via del Campidoglio or Street of the Capitol. Outside the city walls, there was an amphitheatre, seating fifteen thousand people; its outlines can still be seen on curving Via Torta, Via dei Bentaccordi, and Piazza dei Perruzzi, which transcribe half an oval near the church of Santa Croce. The back of Palazzo Vecchio occupies the site of the theatre, and the Baptistery, that of the
praetorium
or residence of the Roman governor. In the Baptistery, in the crypt of San Miniato (the first local Christian martyr; decapitated in the arena, he carried his head across the river and up the hill to what is now his church), there are Roman columns and frilled capitals which were put to use by Romanesque builders. The tradition of Rome is palpable in Florence to those who know that it is there, just as, to those who know of it, the plan of the Roman colony, laid out like a camp or
castrum,
becomes visible in the city’s old streets.

Florence was the ‘daughter’, Rome, the ‘mother’—this was the medieval notion. The Florentines of the Middle Ages boasted of the tradition, claiming descent from noble Roman families. The Uberti, for example, purported to descend from a supposed son of Catiline, pardoned by Caesar and adopted by him under the name of Uberto Cesare. In Dante’s day, it was believed that two races had settled Florence: the nobles or Blacks, who were descended from the soldiers of the Roman army; and the common people or Whites, who were descended from the primitive inhabitants of Fiesole. The incompatibility of these two stocks was held to be the explanation of the perpetual strife in the city. Another story told how Florence, destroyed by Totila, was rebuilt by Charlemagne, who restored it
‘come era,
with its antique form of government—Roman law, consuls, and senators.

These legends and genealogical fantasies struck a core of truth. The sobriety and decorum of Florence is the
gravitas
of Rome—a pioneer, frontier Rome, set in the wild mountains, on a rushing river. This sense of an outpost, of a camp pitched in a military rectangle hard by the mountain of Fiesole, is still perceptible in the streets around the Duomo—Via Ricasoli, Via dei Servi, which run straight out towards the mountain barrier like streets in the raw towns of the old American Far West.

Beneath the surface of Florence lies a sunken Rome. In the dim light, the crypt of San Miniato, with its pillars of odd sizes and shapes, resembles a petrified forest. Tradition used to say that the Baptistery was the old temple of Mars, the war god of Caesar’s veterans, who was the patron of the city. There is a modern theory that the Marzocco or Florentine heraldic lion was really the Martocus or a mutilated equestrian statue of Mars that was left on guard, superstitiously, at Ponte Vecchio, until 1333, when it was carried away by a flood. This statue played an ominous part in Florentine history. In the year 1215, on Easter Sunday, young Buondelmonte de’ Buondelmonti, riding his milk-white palfrey, in his wedding garment, with his marriage wreath on his head, was struck down at the north end of Ponte Vecchio, at the statue’s base, by the Amidei, because he had broken his marriage pledge to a member of their family. This was the fuse that set off the Guelph-Ghibelline chain reaction that continued for a century and a half and nearly consumed the city. In 1300, when the headless and ravaged torso of the god was replaced at its post on Ponte Vecchio, after some building improvements, it was set up facing north instead of east, as it had done in the past; this was considered to be a sinister portent for Florence, and, in fact, that year the Black and White division began. Dante, a White Guelph, who was driven into exile by that feud, identified the angry war god, who had been displaced as the city’s guardian by the Baptist, with the spirit of restless faction in Florence. Much earlier, according to the story, the statue, having been removed from its former temple, was stowed away in a tower near the Arno and fell into the river at the time of the mythical destruction by Totila; if it had not finally been retrieved and set up on Ponte Vecchio, Florence could not have been rebuilt. The flood of 1333, which swept away the bridges together with the statue, was an apocalyptic event. A strange storm began it, lasting ninety-six hours, as described by an eyewitness, the chronicler Villani. There were sheets of fire, thunder, and a continuous stream of water; men and women, crying for mercy, moved from roof to roof on slender planks; tiles fell, towers crashed, the walls gave way; the red columns of San Giovanni were half buried in water. Church and convent bells tolled to exorcise the spirit of the storm. It was not long after this fearful flood and the loss of the guardian statue that another great calamity befell Florence: in 1339, Edward III of England went bankrupt, toppling the two Florentine banking houses of the Bardi and the Peruzzi, which had backed him in his continental wars; this was the ruin of Florence as world banking power.