Postcard from Florence 1: Unsalted Bread

The Duomo is around here somewhere...

My partner is brilliant at researching our holiday trips, and well in advance. She can always find a suitable gîte or flat to rent, the best flights and road routes to get to it, and will already have identified some likely days out and decent restaurants from the guidebooks and websites weeks before we've even left the house. I, by contrast, find even the best guidebooks utterly baffling until I've been "in-country" for a few days. I need to get the feel of a city or a region – literally get its dust on my shoes – before I can start to think of it as a place, made up of sites of interest, galleries, restaurants, and famous streets and squares.

As a consequence, I hadn't really thought much about Florence before first opening the shutters and double glazed windows of our apartment onto the cacophony and brilliant chiaroscuro of an Italian city street, four floors below. Wow! Italy! Florence, no less! I have mentioned before that one of my favourite images is a sketch by Tischbein of the young Goethe, leaning out of an apartment window in Rome, just taking in the view outside, while idly waggling a slipper on one foot. I keep it on my bedside table, as I need to be reminded of the reality of that feeling, those Tischbein moments, awash with the optimism and open-ended possibilities of travel, strange lands, and new languages. It's great, at 62, still to be able feel it, now and again.

After a few preparatory days of walking around in a passive stupor of familiarisation – getting the measure of the streets and the crowds, checking out restaurant menus, trying out my phrasebook Italian, and taking a few exploratory snaps with the Fuji X20, now established in its role as the summer holiday camera – the guidebooks came into focus, with their codes and maps and jargon, and items of interest (to me, at least) began to emerge. One thing I noticed, in particular, was how many cultural figures had lived, and often died, in exile in Florence. And, of those, the names Browning and Tarkovsky leapt out at me.

I suppose I must have known that the Brownings lived in Florence after their elopement, but that knowledge had drifted down, over time, to those lower strata of memory where things like simultaneous equations and Latin grammar are now buried, not needed for many years and beyond instant recall. But when I read that their apartment near the Palazzo Pitti had been preserved intact and could be visited – of course, the Casa Guidi! – I was excited.

For those of a literary bent, there is probably no more formative encounter than the one we have with the books we study at school in the years we are preparing for university entrance; what in England we refer to as the "sixth form". At that romantic, terrible, turbulent age we are open to the poetry of the world in a way we probably never will be again, and I had the good fortune to study Robert Browning's Men and Women as a set text, with a good teacher who happened to be a Browning enthusiast, able to persuade a class of 17-year old boys to take seriously some very adult love poetry, and I have retained a great affection for his work. And the romance between Browning and Elizabeth Barrett is, of course, a cracking good story in its own right.

Wot, no Bob?*

So we went and had a look. It's not exactly easy to find, the Casa Guidi. Luckily, there's a plaque over the street door to commemorate Elizabeth Barrett Browning, more famous as a poet in her day than her husband, and a great and vocal supporter of the cause of Italian unification. You find Piazza San Felice no. 8, ring the "Casa Guidi" bell, and you are let up to the first floor apartment by a housekeeper. It now belongs jointly to Eton College and the Landmark Trust – yes, you can rent some of the rooms – and has been restored to something like its original condition, stuffed in the Victorian fashion with memorabilia and decorative clutter. It doesn't take long to go round, but for a Browning enthusiast is enchanted ground. This is where Men and Women was written! Right here! And, blimey, that is the actual couch from Wimpole Street where EBB languished as an invalid for so many years! Neither my partner nor my daughter have ever studied either of the Brownings, so we didn't hang around for quite as long as I might have wished, not least because there was a genuine sense of intrusion into a private space. Amazingly, according to the visitors' book, we were the first to visit for several days. I hadn't expected a queue, even in August, but I didn't think we'd have the place to ourselves.

Just a 20-minute walk away at 91 Via San Niccolò is the apartment once occupied by exiled Russian film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky, also hard to find, but also marked with a plaque. The Prof and I are both long-standing fans of Tarkovsky's films, but although this is allegedly the base of the Andrei Tarkovsky International Institute it was resolutely shut, so all we could do was gaze up at the shuttered windows and admire the letterbox, which still bears a tiny metal "TARKOVSKIJ" nameplate. Again, no queue, no tributes on the step, just a door in an Italian backstreet. We paid our respects – amazing how quickly three people gazing reverently up at a wall can attract attention – and went for an ice cream.

**

By contrast, one of Florence's own most famous sons, Dante Alighieri, was forced to live out of the city in exile – something to do with Black and White Guelphs, whatever they are – and Florence still doesn't exactly talk up the Dante connection to its tourists. In fact, you'd be forgiven for not knowing there was one. Gucci, yes; Dante, no. We did spot a cafe with the odd name of Sasso di Dante (Dante's Stone) in a little square near the Duomo, and only later discovered this is actually the site of a rock where Dante used to sit each day to watch the construction of the cathedral. I'm not aware of anything in his oeuvre equivalent to "I like work: I can sit and look at it for hours" (Jerome K. Jerome), but on the subject of exile Dante famously had this to say:

You shall leave everything you love most:
This is the arrow that the bow of exile
Shoots first. You are to know the bitter taste
Of others' bread, how salty it is, and know
How hard a path it is for one who goes
Ascending and descending others' stairs ...
Paradiso, XVII (55–60)

Now there's yet another thing I didn't think I knew but must surely once have known. But, having done some supermarket shopping on the first day, I discovered that regular Tuscan bread is indeed made without salt and, to this English palate, anyway, is pretty much inedible. Ugh, talk about the taste of exile!  Although I did develop a liking for a very thin, unleavened bread with a crispy, cracker-like texture, seasoned with salt and rosemary, and sold in packs of foot-square sheets in local stores. I suppose exile in Florence might not be so bad, after all...

As to the stairs, though, ascending and descending, after our experience with the ten flights of ten stairs up to our Lisbon apartment last year, this year we made sure we had a lift! Or, at least, my partner did: she's good at that sort of thing.

Florence at night, by summer lightning

* 

Here wrote and died

Elizabeth Barret[t] Browning

who in her womanly heart combined

the science of the scholar and the spirit of the poet

and made of her verse a golden ring

linking Italy and England.

This memorial was placed here

by a grateful Florence

1861

** 

Andrei Tarkovsky

sublime director of a

spiritual cinema

exile in Florence

in this house spent

the last years of his life

guest and honorary citizen

of the city of Florence