Arno river. photo by sarah macdonald.
I’m not going to start with the scared dogs I’ve encountered in many piazzas. Soon, but not yet. I’ll start with me yelling LET’S GO RAPTORS out the window of Jamie’s apartment to a tourist on the street below. He was wearing the light purple, black, and white Toronto Raptors bomber from a few seasons ago that, of course, I coveted. It made me think of my jacket back home—the championship bomber I got for Christmas in 2019—that has a rip down the side and I need to get it mended. An appropriate metaphor for the season the Raptors just had. I yelled that down at him and walked away from the window, unbothered by whatever his reaction could be until Jamie said he was laughing and looking around to see who had done it. What a sweet connection I didn’t bother to hold. He yelled something back but I couldn’t make it out. It was home without being at home.
I suppose I’m starting here because this is how I want to remember Florence. This is how I want to be in Florence. Light, fun, meandering. Otherwise I’m going to think about all of the tourists, how a wide open space can feel claustrophobic, and that I hear more English than Italian. I’ve seen dozens of small dogs (dachshunds, chihuahuas, etc.) tremble in fear as their owners consider their phone more than the animal next to them. I may be projecting. (I’m definitely projecting.) I tend to look at something through the lens of how I would experience it or how I would perceive it (who among us isn’t like that sometimes?), so when I see a small dog shaking beside its owner who is on their phone I wonder how scared that animal is—a sea of people around it.
Not long ago, I got in from a walk to what I hear is a stunning garden that, on this sunny and breezy Sunday in Florence, has an exceptionally long line of people waiting to get in. I’m not big on waiting in lines, especially if I have time, so I left. I went to a grocery store and bought some salami, a bottle of wine for €8, porchetta chips, and green juice in the vain effort to offset all of the meat and carbs I’ve been eating. Doing something ordinary, as simple as walking in a grocery store, and drifting down each aisle the way I did, felt special. It felt good.
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Florence is beautiful. I feel there’s no other way to say it than that. Across the Arno river you can see the Tuscan hills, cypress trees peeking out. The sky is so blue and the clouds so white—looking at them reflected in the river feels like twice the reward for such a sight. At night, the Duomo is impossibly big. Towering. I hear the bells at 7 a.m. They wake me not gently but forcefully and that’s how I prefer church bells. If you’re going to give it, you might as well give it. They rang within 15 minutes of each other this morning, the ones you hear beckoning you to church, to commune with God. It must be obligatory at this point because lines stream out all over the piazza for people to get in. I can’t imagine any locals going to the Duomo on Sunday mornings to pray.
On my first night, Jamie and Lauren and I went out to dinner at Gilda’s. I can’t keep Gilda’s off anyone’s radar. I love Gilda. She has siren red hair, smiles sweetly, and bugs you to finish off your plate of food in front of you before putting down another. Her restaurant had only two other tables of people. There, space. She handed us potato puree or a thick potato soup and I don’t know what was in it but it was simple and delicious. Her glassware didn’t match. Goblets for wine glasses, wine glasses for water glasses. The house red wine tasted exactly like what I needed at that moment. Her prego sounded like a lullaby. I had pasta with pureed asparagus. The heat rose from the noodles until the very last bite. We stayed until the restaurant was empty. I didn’t realize then how rare that would be.
Gilda’s. photo by sarah macdonald.
I’ve thought a lot about and encountered much around space. Yesterday, during tarot circle, Amanda said that intimacy—perhaps about these tourists, perhaps in general—might generally mean a physical closeness to something. To be intimate with something (art, a person, or a moment) you must be so close to it that you can almost touch it. At the Uffizi Gallery, in front of one of the only known pieces of art I could actually see up close, I watched a woman walk up to Caravaggio’s Medusa with her phone camera framing up the piece, and then zoom in once she got close. She didn’t do it for a specific texture of the piece. She just wanted to be close to it.
I understand the urge to be close to something. To someone. Watching people go up close to statues, canvas, busts, just to the barriers of things is really interesting. It’s just them and the thing they desire. But in the pursuit of that, it seems, they’re always pushing up against something, some kind of boundary, to get to it.
Medusa. photo by sarah macdonald.
I’m prickly about my physical space. Two women behind me at the gallery’s entrance kept pushing their bodies into mine and I thought, this is my space, we’re all going to get in anyway, what’s the rush? There’s a lack of consciousness for some around other people's intimacy edges and what their own sense of space is. I’m learning to have grace for the people around me. Once I could be free of people in the gallery, I managed to create space for myself and away from those circling to see whatever they wish through their camera lens. I watched the light instead—how the statues of Venus in the spotlight gave off a stark, precise shadow just behind them. They fascinated me. I wanted to spend my time looking at the Greek inscriptions in gold on busts of men who, I think only because they were in a gallery and because they were quote-unquote ideal looking Western men, looked bigger than who they likely really were a few thousand years ago. Teenagers wove their way around me; middle aged mums trying to wrangle their groups. I walked as slow as possible through each room until the sheer amount of people exhausted me and I had to leave. I saw a Jenny Holzer. I hold that once close.
Earlier today I overheard an American tourist say the Minnesota Timberwolves slapped the shit out of the Phoenix Suns. I love connecting with Americans during the NBA playoff season. I’ve listened not much to music or podcasts or anything but the sounds of the city. It can irritate but also soften me or the experience. Here is something about space, too. We drifted by each other. I said, hell ya they did, despite me wanting the Suns to progress, and I am sure he heard me. Isn’t that invasive too? Walking into someone else’s conversation, someone else’s life. I see where I am pressing against someone else’s boundaries.
I want to have the space to be in awe—to wonder the way I do in a new place and let that expand outward. It’s a privilege to travel, and the older I get the tighter I hold that reality to my chest and care for it. I tried hard to write something that wouldn’t be harsh or complaining. When your expectations don’t match up to reality, you have to pivot, and there is space and grace and care.
Last night, after dinner, after the rain, the sky turned to a soft pink, and then almost a periwinkle blue. It was marvelous. I couldn’t believe it. The whole of Florence’s city centre just draped in colour that looked like watercolour brushstrokes. I take photos like every other tourist in this city, like every other person on this planet with a phone for a camera. I want to remember and I want to remind myself of what was in front of me. Not because it’s where everyone went, where we ought to go, cramming up to and against each other because there was a good Google review about a place. The same moon hangs over us each night—getting fuller, brighter. The same sky. There’s a different body of water but a similar experience. It’s colder, windier by the water. I like to feel that familiarity on my skin. The sun is that way, too—hot over top of me, reminding me the summer is coming but, okay Sarah, let’s get a taste here and now.
photo by sarah macdonald.
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