One summer about 10 years ago, I found myself in the unusual position of staying at home in Florence for the month of August. During that month the city, except for its main tourist arteries, is a radically different place from its usual self. Essentially, it is deserted. Because the streets are free of noisy traffic and most of the shops are closed, one is presented with the ideal opportunity to experience Florence and its architecture in a relaxed and contemplative way.
I have long been in the habit of walking around the city with my sketchbook and watercolors, but during this particular August I decided instead to bring with me only a notebook and pen. I was curious to see whether I could compose a portrait in words that was both parallel and complementary to the effect I could achieve with my paints. The result of those pleasant days of rambling and writing—a series of narrative vignettes—I collected into a small book, eventually published as Florence: A Map of Perceptions (University of Virginia Press, 2010).
During that August interlude I came to see that, though the end products are different, the acts of writing and drawing have certain commonalities. Both a drawing and a narrative can be primarily descriptive in character, based on analytical intent, or driven by metaphor or analogy. For example, passing daily in front of Palazzo Vecchio, I notice that every afternoon at a certain hour its facade takes on a splendid tridimensionality. On inspection, I find this happens because the facade is west-facing and the sun’s rays strike it sideways from due south, creating a chiaroscuro effect. The same phenomenon occurs in winter, when the sun is low on the horizon. One might expect its weak beams to leave the facade in shadow; but in fact the nearby Uffizi Gallery is like a hole cut into the city fabric, and the low winter sunlight shines right through it to illuminate the facade of Palazzo Vecchio. So I wonder: Why not tell people, in an architecture or tourist guidebook, the best hour of the day in which to admire a monument, a square, or an open-air public sculpture? I make a note of this possibility, if for no other reason than to try the exercise myself.
Tactile encounters abound. Maybe I am walking along a typical street in the urban center. I raise an arm to touch the walls of the adjacent buildings with my fingertips, and the sensations nudge me to consider the haptic dimension of the city, and the materials from which it is constructed. Another time, riding my bicycle, I turn my attention to the various pavements of the city’s thoroughfares. Irregularly cut stones arranged together like a puzzle are supreme in beauty and philological rigor, but they are barely acceptable for bike riding: Cobblestones can be extremely dangerous for the cyclist if two or more adjacent cubes are missing. Asphalt, on the other hand, is undoubtedly the best surface for bicycle riding, but it is both ugly and an insult to the city’s history and character. If I were in charge, I would have it pulled up immediately and replaced by appropriate stone, and I would prohibit its use ever again.
A mood or state of mind may be activated by any place in which one finds oneself at a given moment—and perhaps, indeed, by the transformation of such a place. Thus, while sitting on a particular stone bench in Piazza Santa Croce, I reflect on the many times in the past I have lounged in the sun on this same bench, and on how much everything has changed here. The square was once a parking lot with a statue of Dante in its middle, but in the 1970s it became an open space, the statue shunted over to the side of the church. The shops have become tourist boutiques; the marble of the church has been altered by polishing and restoration with resins. Even the pigeons are many generations removed from those of my youth. I myself have changed, too: I am a different person now with different thoughts, different clothes. My hair has been cut and grown countless times; the very cells in my body have died and been replenished. But in the end I am still myself, and the square, too, despite all transformations, is still herself, my old, beloved square. How could I paint this process of transformation and sameness?
Metaphorical tales, I think, reveal the most poetic qualities of urban spaces. Inventing parallel images, one may experience the familiar and everyday anew, perhaps even excavate unexpected meanings. One might fancy, say, that the many unfinished medieval facades of the churches of Florence reflect the sense of instability that characterizes our time. How different this attitude is from the complacent certainty which, in the 1800s, dictated that the facades of certain major Florentine churches be completed. Now we no longer feel that need. On the contrary, we accept these unfinished works and consider them, perhaps, a symbol of the mysterious infinite.
Metaphor can also transform a built townscape into an imagined seascape. Observing the skyline of Florence from a terrace or a point on the hills, I envision it as a great body of water in which the roofs are waves, the TV-antennae twigs breaking the surface, the terraces drifting rafts, the basilicas on the horizon the hulls of distant ships.
In words, the city materializes as a living organism and can be revealed in ways that defy visual depiction. One may follow its transformation in time, touch and caress its physical self, penetrate its most hidden places. Its fragile nature is thus exposed, along with the dangers that constantly confront its venerable body: the loss of identity brought on by uncontrolled expansion into the countryside, the public spaces homogenized and reduced to pure touristic functionality, the destructive effects of traffic on the environmental and aesthetic quality of everyday life.
These are facts, and unhappy ones. Nevertheless, the short tales in my book are not polemical. What I have tried to convey, rather, is a subjective but shareable affection for Florence—a place both in and outside of time, constantly renewed in a dialogue between our thoughts and our senses..
