Urban Venus (5 page)

I wake up with a small jolt – surely I can’t have been asleep? No, that’s not possible; I’ve only been sitting here for a few minutes, haven’t I? Not time enough for a nap. Glancing quickly at my watch for reassurance I see that barely any time has passed at all and yet I feel like I am waking from a long sleep, as refreshed as if I had slept for hours. This tiredness is starting to get to me, and I know I haven’t given myself proper time to recover from the journey yesterday, fool that I am. My mother would have something to say about that if she were here, which thankfully she isn’t. Which reminds me, I must call them all later and let them know I’m still alive. I’d sent a quick text on my arrival but that was the only newsflash so far. Was it really only yesterday that I arrived? Somehow I find that hard to believe. Must be all this napping, giving me the illusion of having spent more nights here than just the one that I actually have.

Rubbing my eyes I glance across in the direction of the guard’s seat. The male guard from earlier has now morphed into a woman, so I suppose I must have slept for long enough to miss that changeover. This one is a stout lady in her late fifties who looks more National Trust volunteer than scary security staff, so I don’t think my oddness will result in her having me carried off to the madhouse just yet. This strange English woman who sits and giggles in front of the Venus painting and then decides to follow that moment of madness with a little nap on the bench. I am sure they get all sorts in here, not just art nutters like me, overcome with tiredness and the excitement of it all.

As my mind re-engages I have the vague recollection of a dream of some sort. Amazing how the brain can pack what feels like a fully-fledged action-packed movie into the space of a few minutes’ doze. At home I used to have my best dreams in the morning, in those few precious moments before waking up properly, almost as though the subconscious which has stirred slightly from the deeper slumber of the night is more capable of producing dreams than the unconscious, dead-to-the-world state that most of us occupy for the majority of our sleeping hours. Or maybe it’s just that we remember these ones more easily, as they take place so close to us waking up?

Fascinating subject, dreams, and something I want to explore whilst I’m here. After all, so many paintings are depictions of dreams, or stories of divine inspiration. It has to be a possible topic for my dissertation, as there’s so much material I could use. I haven’t really decided yet, but I certainly should give it some serious thought, given my own predisposition to dreaming.

I’ve always been a bit of a daydreamer too, which has been a constant source of irritation to parents, teachers and the like over the years. But I always counter it with the argument that you can’t have a proper artistic temperament without the ability to dream. That only ever got me out of trouble in more recent years, I have to say, when my artistic skills did start to look like they might be half decent, but it was always worth a try.

I can’t really get my head around what the dream just now was all about. I have a strong recollection of touch, sensuousness and a deep feeling of love between two people. I felt exposed, almost naked even, and when I came to I half expected to have to cover myself up, here in the gallery. It must have something to do with gazing at all these romantic images, I suppose, and I shrug it off for the moment as no more than the wanderings of a very tired mind. Early night tonight, I resolve. No partying in the piazza for me, just a sensible, quiet night in before I head off to my first day at the uni tomorrow.

Five

Monday morning dawns bright and sunny – again. Oh, to live forever in a place like this where the sun always shines, the sky is always the kind of blue a child would paint it, and the temperature is short-sleeve warm, even at this early hour of the day. And here we are rapidly approaching October; at home it would all be grey skies, lots of rain, and we’d have hauled the winter woollies out of the wardrobe long since. Here it’s definitely still late summer, with no obvious signs of autumn as yet.

It has to be good for the soul to live somewhere like this – how could anyone ever contemplate being miserable here? I throw open the shutters in my room to an onslaught of brightness and breathe in the rose-smelling scent from the trailers beneath the window. All sad or bad thoughts seem to have deserted me since I arrived here; the change of scene, climate, culture, or a combination of the three, seems to be divesting me of my worries more than any other distraction I’ve tried so far. Ed? Ed who? Who was he? Oh, just some stupid bloke I once knew who didn’t know what was good for him. Who needs him, anyway? I certainly don’t. The course of my new life here stretches ahead of me like unchartered waters, waiting for me to pull up anchor and set sail. I can’t wait.

Leonora has to go in for a lecture this morning, so she suggests I tag along with her. She’s a Law student, so she can at least point me in the direction of the Arts Faculty and leave me to it. I need to go and get hold of all the forms I need, not just to register at the University but to make myself legal for living here too; residence permits, all that sort of official stuff. As we dog-leg at a brisk pace through a network of tiny backstreets whose names all blur into one, I wonder how on earth I will find my way home later. Fortunately, like the tourists from whom, thanks to my educational motivations for being here, I am one step up on the evolutionary scale, I am fully equipped with map and compass, in the guise of very clever iPhone apps, plus I do possess the ability to be able to make myself understood in the native language. Well, just about, anyway.

Finally the imposingly grand Palazzo Strozzi looms before us, and I part company with Leonora, who has a breakfast date with a friend before her lecture. I manage to locate the building in the Via del Parione, and firmly put on my best Italian-thinking head before braving it alone.

So, now I am legal. Forms all completed, in duplicate, triplicate and whatever else they were, just loads of them it seemed, all in very complex Italian with hardly any punctuation, a bit like English legal documents only they could have been in ancient Greek, for all that I understood them. I will probably find out all too late that I’ve signed up for some dodgy time-share, bought a car or pledged to donate my organs, instead of applying for my course and the various study and residence permits I need. I hadn’t realised just how bureaucratic the Italian way of doing things would be – it had been bad enough at home filling in all the documents I needed just to get me here, and now I
am
here I have had to do it all over again, tenfold. So much for us all being in Europe and it being a paperless society in the twenty-first century. Ha.

Formalities dealt with, it’s time to meet my tutor. Signore Tizzaro’s office is Room 26a on the third floor in Block B, so I have been informed (and thankfully understood) so I grab my map of the building and head off. I must be getting near when I hear raised voices. Clearly someone is not a happy bunny; a male and a female voice are in the full throes of a pretty vitriolic argument, but I can’t hear enough to decipher what is being said. Suddenly a door flies open with a bang and a very angry, but very attractive girl, most likely a student from the armfuls of books she is clutching, flies out into the corridor, flicks her hair aggressively over her shoulder with a scowl and flounces off towards the staircase.

I look around for 26a before realising it’s the room the girl has just emerged from. Great, Signore Tizzaro is really going to be in a receptive mood for meeting a new student, especially one with whom there’s likely to be a little bit of a language barrier, requiring him to make more of an effort to communicate than normal. Perhaps I should come back later, or tomorrow, I wonder, but as I stand in the corridor, poised either to knock or to flee, I haven’t yet decided which, his door flies open again and this time, he (I assume it’s him) is standing there, tucking in his shirt and running fingers through dark, dishevelled hair.

‘
La Signorina Irvine, presumo di sì
!’ he exclaims, pronouncing my surname
‘Ear-veen-ay
’ as his expression softens from the taut air of post-argument tension to a more welcoming smile in a mere split-second. Either this guy is a great actor, or that fight didn’t really mean much to him at all. Whereas that poor girl looked like she was about to throw herself from the campanile at sunset. I hope for her sake that she was unhappy with her grades, or something like that, rather than it being a disagreement of a more personal nature… In any case, it’s nothing to do with me, and as long as he is a good tutor, then that’s all that matters.

If I had been expecting a crusty old academic, then Signore Tizzaro is about as far removed from that as you could possibly get. He doesn’t look that much older than me, although he has to be, I suppose, if you take into account the number of years of effort actually required to get to professor-hood. Such gravitas doesn’t come with extreme youth, so he must be thirty as a minimum, I’d guess, and he’d have to be at least that old to have read half the books lining his shelves. And, I note later, to have written the six volumes of his own work, displayed in a rather prominent position on the bottom shelf near his desk. In the corner of his office there is an easel with a half-completed painting, and despite its state I can clearly see that it is of the girl who left his office just now. Model as well as student then….hmmmm.

Signore Tizzaro invites me to call him Vincenzo. Apparently there aren’t the formalities in the Italian higher-education system that we have back home, he says. Yeah, right, try telling that to the guy on the admin desk who had me filling in fifty thousand forms not too many moons ago. Formality was
his
middle name. I have to say that whilst the arrays of books lining his room are impressive, Signore Tizzaro, or should I say Vincenzo, fails to make the initial impression on me that he is clearly hoping to. After my obvious exposure to the argument, he seems to be trying too hard to compensate by laying on the charm, but why he should feel he needs to is a mystery to me; he’s my tutor, not a prospective lover. I’ve already marked his card as a womaniser, even with so little evidence to go on. Whilst my new friends Stefano, Dante and Lanzo seem to be able to carry off that very over-the-top Italian ‘way with women’ without it seeming offensive, Vincenzo just comes across as a bit creepy. Which is a shame, as I had been hoping for someone to look up to this year, someone I could draw inspiration from. But that’s going to be tricky if I don’t feel entirely comfortable with him.

During and after our first conversation, I can’t help thinking back to that poor girl leaving his office; I wonder exactly what cause she had to be so angry with him, and the word ‘sleazebag’ keeps popping into my head. I try to divorce it from my professional opinion; we have to work together, after all. I can’t allow myself to think at this stage that it was a lovers’ tiff. I shouldn’t be drawing such conclusions based on first impressions alone, and I resolve to give the guy a break, see what he has to offer me. I’m not normally one to judge people I hardly know so harshly.

I leave Vincenzo’s office with a lecture timetable, study guide, map of the city (another one) and various other bits of paperwork to add to the green, pink and blue sheets of paper Mr Formality downstairs gave me earlier. Luckily for me it looks as though my lectures are scattered about in various parts of the city centre, and some even in the great homes of art themselves, so I consider myself very fortunate not to have to traipse off to some dull 1970’s concrete lecture theatre every day. It seems the faculty like to present as many of the lectures as possible in situ, and who can blame them; it has to be heaps easier to inspire your students when you actually have the art to hand as a prop, instead of relying on PowerPoint and other mock-ups, as we had to back home.

As for today, I want to go to this afternoon’s lecture on Raphael, which is being held in a side room at the Uffizi. Great, another chance to get back in there, and this time without having to buy a ticket; the uni provides us with special passes on the days we need to get in there for lectures. I must remember that – it’s one way to save the Euros, to hoard up my visits for days when I can get in for free!

After leaving Newcastle with my bank balance looking none too healthy at the end of the summer term, I had worked a lot over the long holidays. Well, a lot is a bit of an understatement actually, as I’d worked all the hours I possibly could in a vain attempt to erase Ed from my mind and not be left sitting around with time on my hands, going over it all time after time. That last bit hadn’t worked too well but at least the financial side of my plans was a success and I’d managed to pay off my overdraft and save up enough to see me through – hopefully – most of this year. My parents are helping me out with accommodation costs – I don’t see how I could do this otherwise – but I don’t want to have to put on them any more than I have to so I need to be careful, or I will end up having to work whilst I’m here too. And I’d planned not to have to do that.

The lecturer looks an interesting sort; typical ‘mad professor’ hair cut (although that mop probably hasn’t seen a pair of scissors in two decades, more likely a set of garden shears), dreadfully mismatched clothes (aren’t we in one of the Italian centres for fashion here?) and a set of teeth that could be used as park railings, complete with rust. Nothing aesthetically pleasing about him at all, although Vincenzo did say he was one of the more brilliant and inspiring lecturers, so again I need to maintain an open mind and give him a chance, and stop judging people on first impressions.