Firenze: new photographs of Florence
all photographs copyright © Harlan Wallach 1994
Thus spake the lord:"We have given you, Adam, neither a fixed place, nor an aspect of your own, nor any special privilege, so that the place, the aspect and the privileges that you desire you may obtain and preserve yourself according to your own inclinations. The clearly defined nature of the others is a prisoner of the laws that we have proclaimed. But you, who are not a prisoner of any constraint, you will determine your nature according to your own free will to which I have entrusted you. I have put you amidst the world so that from there you can better perceive all that is in the world. We have made you neither heavenly, nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal, so that, as the free and sovereign modeler and sculptor of yourself, you can carve yourself in the shape that you choose. You can degenerate and fall to the lower beings who are the animals, you can, if you decide, regenerate yourself and climb towards the higher beings who are divine."
Pico della Mirandola,Discourse on the dignity of Man( 1486)
And the Arno river tumbles down the slopes of the Pratomagno and goes from being a mountain stream to a slow moving river when it hits the bottom of the valley, where Florence sits on both sides of its bank. The river flows in clean and fast and leaves less of both. The city is all small streets with terra cotta tile roofs and cast iron rings on the walls where once horses were tied up. These rings are all now rusted solid in place because no one cared enough to pull the the ring out once a year to keep it free and swinging. All the streets point to theDuomo of Brunelleschi at one time or another. It pokes up above the roofs like a giant porcini mushroom that the florentines are all crazy about. Its just another amazing view for the natives as they tool about in their vespas and sunglasses. Hundreds of feet of orange tile dome with green, white and red marble icing. It was the evening of a day of aimless walking around the small streets and museums and trattorias and gelaterias and paying twice as much as everything was marked. We crossed through a modern tourist square, the site of the ancient, now demolished, jewish ghetto. I said " Isn’t it time for the boys to go get drunk ?", so Alphonse and I bought a bottle of chianti at the Moka Efti near our infirmary on Via Faenza, and it was gone by the time we reached the second most famous bridge, the Ponte Trinite. We got another bottle when we reached the Altarno, transcendence at the pop of a cork. We drank and walked and talked,the occasional scooter punctuating the tuscan spring night. It was cold during the day, warm at night. We came to the old city wall, a thousand year old rampart, that had been the state of the art in defensible perimeters, a giant ring of stone, the patriot missile of its day. It was late in the evening, early in the spring, that fabulous time of year when all the trees hang their sexual organs on the outside for a change and the air is perfumed. We walked along the cobblestone road, with overhanging streetlights casting small circles of yellow light hundreds of yards apart . The eight foot wall around the Boboli gardens on the right, and the fifty foot massive stone wall on the other, covered with trees and moss and wild wisteria hanging its purple clusters of flowers off the crumbling battlements. I jumped on the wall to look into the Boboli gardens, and fell back with a piece of mortar from the top of the wall in my hand. I looked at Alphonse and said " I think I’ll bring this back". We followed the wall down, back into the city, and came to a gate, an arched breach in the wall, crossed through to find ourselves at Andreas, a Moka Efti wine bar we had frequented earlier in the week. We went in to get some more wine, the walk had parched us. We got a bottle of the 12,000 lira Chianti, and Andreas told us to drink quickly, his girlfriend was having a baby and he had to close soon. We obliged. On the way back to the infirmary, we walked by the house where Galileo served out his papal edict house arrest. Now proudly displaying the history of the criminal that was once locked inside for saying that the earth was not the center of the universe. So much for the truth, no one who speaks it deserves less.
© copyright Harlan Wallach 1996