Firenze

We’ve been in Florence all day today. It’s my first trip here for at least twenty years and I remembered very little. We weren’t really sight seeing. I was here to see my oldest friend in the world, Tammy. We met at the age of eleven and were inseparable all the way through secondary school. Because the two of us were behind the organisation of every inter-form competition or initiative, our friendship was seen as so important to the well-being of our class that, on the one occasion that we did fall out, the form tutor locked us in a room together and refused to allow us out until we were friends again!

It was so lovely to see her. I don’t think she’s changed to look at in all the years I’ve known her. She’s a true example of someone who decided to go out there and get life, and, in the process, beat the Northamptonshire malaise into a cocked hat. I was very moved to hear her saying today that she’d bought her seven-year old daughter, Evie, a little print which shows a baby bird sitting in a tree with a mummy bird on the ground underneath. The baby is saying “but Mummy, what if I fall?” to which the mother responds, “but darling, what if you FLY?!” Tammy wants her daughter to know that she can achieve anything in life. Tammy herself grew up in a little semi-detached house in Northamptonshire and now lives with a Ferrari engineer in Italy with two bi-lingual children. That’s what happens when you’re not afraid to look beyond the visible horizon.

The Duomo in Florence is one of the wonders of the world. It’s cream walls glow yellow in the Tuscan sun and it’s covered in the most ornate red and green geometric carvings. Of course it’s the giant dome which rightly attracts the most attention. I think it was only recently that they even worked out how they’d made it. Something to do with a false wooden wall within. I think they may have pedestrianised the roads around the cathedral in recent years because my memory of it was as beautiful building almost strangled by the cars speeding past. Or perhaps that’s another false memory...

It was rather lovely to arrive there today to find two men up a cherry picker, dressing an enormous Christmas tree. The Italians apparently don’t really start “doing” Christmas until the 8th of December which is apparently when Mary the Muv got fiddled with by some kind of angel, and if this crazy myth prevents the shops in Italy from playing carols at Hallowe’en, I’m massively in favour of it! But a three week gestation period? Come on! What was Jesus? A rabbit?

On Tammy’s advice we crossed over the iconic Ponte Vecchio (that’s the one lined with jewellery shops which gets name-checked in O Mio Babbino Caro) and walked up to a park on the north side of the city where the views are staggering. Whilst you’re in Florence itself, it’s impossible to get a sense of quite how beautiful those terracotta-tiled roofs can look. But standing on a hillside, looking down, you instantly become aware of how breathtaking they are. Seeing Florence from that hillside makes me understand why my mother cried when she saw the city for the first time.

We crossed the river and went for lunch in a fancy little cafe where plastic tubing was hanging from the roof in the style of some sort of trendy installation, which actually felt like the sitting underneath a deconstructed church organ. I briefly wondered if I would survive one of the pipes falling onto my head, and, after deciding I would, allowed myself to enjoy the pasta/Greek salad combination that all three of us opted for.


After eating we went to a shop which specialised in glassware. I got a little carried away and bought all manner of little trinkets, mostly for Christmas presents. I’ve always been quite a fan of colourful Italian glass.

We stumbled upon a Christmas market in Piazza Santa Croce where all three of us, in an uncontrolled frenzy, bought large quantities of wooden and glass tat including a Christmas bauble in the shape of a tiny house, a glass angel and a fridge magnet which looked like a bumble bee. Tammy bought three packets of cheddar cheese from an English stall and I bought a pastry thing which was so dry it soaked up every inch of saliva in my mouth!

...We laughed as well. Tammy told Michael how, whenever she’s with me, within seconds she feels like a teenaged girl again, and I realised that I do exactly the same. Tammy was always a wonderfully receptive audience for my naughtiness and we have always laughed and laughed and laughed together. And then laughed a little more.

We snaked our way back through the big square where the replica of Michaelangelo’s David sits alongside all sorts of over-dramatic statues of people clubbing each other to death and things. We possibly should have taken more interest in the details. Maybe a trip to the Uffizi would have been appropriate, but actually I wanted to go to Tiger to buy more tat, largely because Tammy had bought an advent candle from there which I coveted. Walking around Tiger is such a strange experience, not dissimilar to Ikea. Once you enter, your only option is to keep going, passing all the weird little objects you never knew you needed so much.

Our magical trip ended with freshly squeezed orange juice in the glorious train station, which, “rebuilt” in 1934, is a quintessential and beautiful example of 1930s functional architecture. The Brits, of course, would have stripped out all the original features and replaced them with plastic and chip board, but the Italians have left all the original signage intact which is all in that wonderfully brutalist font which makes the train station a phenomenal deco time capsule which I would urge anyone to go and see.

As we bade our fond farewells to Tammy, we realised that a massive murmuration of starlings was happening in the sky above the station. And what a glorious sight that is. Genuinely one of the greatest gifts that nature can give. The patterns those birds created in the air, ebbing and flowing like coal dust in a lava lamp was awe-inspiring, particularly against a setting sun.

It was rather wonderful to be walking around Florence on a Monday in early December. The city was about as empty as you could ever expect it to be, and because the sun was shining, it was next to perfect. I remember the hoards of tourists during my last visit and fighting to get across the Ponte Vecchio. Like Cambridge, it’s a small city which struggles not to drown under the weight of its visitors. A rather plaintive piece of graffiti (in Italian) read, “the city is being stolen from us by tourists.” As Michael says, the interesting thing about graffiti is seeing the stuff that doesn’t get removed. For many years a star of David hanging from a noose was scrawled on a wall in the old Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, and, in the village down the road from our B and B here in Tuscany there are two giant swastikas. Why would villagers not have that removed? And it strikes me that this particular piece of graffiti has been left in Florence either because the authorities agree with the sentiment, or, because the sentiment itself is true, namely that the money generated by bus loads of tourists descending on the city isn’t filtering down to those who clean the streets.