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Florence, looking for a new Renaissance

Of Florence, of its history and of its art we have already spoken at great length in the introduction. It is perhaps true that “a picture paints a thousand words”, and so, in this first chapter of the book, dedicated to the city, we will let the images themselves recount Florence. These images may well be rather distant from everyday reality, memories of a past which no longer exists and which will not return, but it is perhaps precisely this that allows them to capture the essence of the great vision the geniuses of the Renaissance had of Man, of Art and of Architecture.

Like other great cities which at the height of their economic power also reach the height of the development of thought and of the arts, and which in that particular historical moment and only then, become a point of reference for all of humanity, thus Florence, at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century, found itself the capital of the world. It was the same for Athens and Rome, and more recently for Vienna, Paris, London and today is thus for New York. Inevitably, however, every rise is followed by a fall.

02 - Florence, looking for a new Renaissance

Modern Florence has been transformed into a Disneyland for mass tourism. Every day thousands of tourists pour into the city like hordes of locusts: they manage in a couple of hours to gulp down Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, the Uffizi, before rushing off to shop, the only thing that really interests them, in the chic boutiques of Via Tornabuoni or in the numerous shoe-shops and leather shops that together with the hundreds of fast-food restaurants, pizza places, icecream parlours, small money-changing bureaus, have spread throughout the city-centre, irreparably disfiguring that Renaissance-soaked atmosphere that until the beginning of the 1970s it was still possible to breathe.

Florence is a city imprisoned in a valley with little ventilation, freezing cold and wet in winter, boiling hot in summer, and today in the centre even the air is no longer fit to breathe, polluted as it is by a noisy and choked-up traffic, consisting besides the cars of a noisy and smelly army of thousands of mopeds to which the foolish managers of Palazzo Vecchio, home to the City Council, have, in recent years, given free rein. And to think that in ten to fifteen minutes it’s possible to cross the whole city by bicycle!

There is, moreover, in Florence an almost total absence of any form of expression associated with contemporary culture and art. It is true that when the Cathedral cupola was completed a law was passed, fortu-nately, that in Florence never ...

... again could anything be built that was higher than the average level of the roofs of the houses of that time, so that the cupola could be seen from a great distance; but nobody decreed that after the Renaissance, for its time an incredible expression of modernity, that all further expressions of art and culture should be banned from Florence. And yet Florence is perhaps the only city in the world which does not have either a contemporary museum or an art gallery deserving of the title.

It is as if the city after the Renaissance had exhausted itself for ever in the effort of generating that unrepeatable beauty. Perhaps the truth is that the Florentines are content simply to sell T-shirts, postcards, pizzas and shoes in the shadow of the Uffizi and of the city’s glorious past. But despite all these sad problems, undoubtedly common to other tourist cities, Florence remains in the heart of anyone who has visited it and still exerts such charm that it can, without warning, seduce you, making you pause enraptured to breathe in the atmosphere of one of the small streets of San Frediano or Santa Croce, hidden from the organized flow of mass tourism. Here you can still find the occasional elderly artisan who restores antique furniture, and here too the neighbourhood women lean out of their windows to chat and gossip as they hang their washing on the lines stretched out over the street as they’ve been doing for centuries.

Or else a friend with a small boat might take you out on the Arno river, today unfortunately extremely polluted, but where until after the last world war many people still used boats for pleasure or for necessity, and there you rediscover the emotion of seeing Ponte Vecchio or Ponte Santa Trinita from the water: what a sight! It is in moments such as these that Florence captures and seduces you with her age-old beauty. Moreover, it goes without saying, the desire to photograph her returns: to pay homage to those men, geniuses of humanity, who created it; to bear witness to her eternal beauty despite the way that the Florentines of the new millennium have squandered the inheritance left to them by the Renaissance.

A final piece of advice: to enjoy that charm that Florence nevertheless still possesses, visit it towards the end of September or the beginning of October, when the flow of tourists has diminished somewhat and the weather is mild.

If, on the other hand, you decide to come in spring, find yourself an ‘agriturismo’ (a farmhouse which offers hospitality to paying guests) in the countryside just outside the city.

It is here that one grasps the true beauty of Florence: in its intimate relationship with the countryside that surrounds it. You can enjoy the marvellous colours and perfumes of the fields in flower and suddenly the original meaning of its name, Florentia in Latin, will become clear to you: blooming, full of flowers!

Photogallery  02 - Florence, looking for a new Renaissance

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