Florence then and now

First view of the Duomo
at night

Eighty excited university students stared out the windows as our bus wound its way through the dim, narrow streets of Florence.  It was April 2, 1961.  Our bus had carried us all the way from the Milan airport.  We were arriving in the dark at our new home, arriving in the early morning hours.

It was Easter.  We were shown our rooms at Villa San Paolo -- boys on the second floor, girls on the third.  As close to coeducational living as any university students had ever experienced in those days.  We collapsed in our beds only to arise again -- perhaps half the group, members of any or no faith -- three hours or so later to attend Easter morning mass at the small parish church around the corner, the church that in some way owned the villa. 

We walked out the gate into the early light of morning.  The first Florentine resident I saw was a small lady, dressed all in black, sweeping her doorstep with a primitive broom.  I really was in Italy.  My image of Italy.  My first travel outside North America.

Duomo

The church was surprisingly modern in design, and I was mildly appalled by the use of electric lights for candles.  But in those days, the mass everywhere was in Latin.  Everything, aside from a sermon delivered in excitable Italian, was quite familiar.

Last week, I arrived by rail from La Spezia at Florence's Stazione Santa Maria Novella.  I arrived not in the dark, but in the late dusk.  I wasn't delivered to a villa, or shown to what was in effect a dorm room.  Instead, GPS in hand, I walked less than ten minutes to a decent hotel room I had booked, half way between the station and the Duomo (Florence's famous cathedral).  Fortunately, although by then dark, it wasn't too late to go exploring, and I walked around the Duomo and down the avenue to the civil authorities' corresponding "cathedral," the Palazzo Vecchio (or Palazzo della Signoria).  The night was warm, the crowds were out, the streets were packed.  The floodlit buildings glowed in the darkness like ghosts out of the past.  Florence once again worked its magic on my imagination and on my soul.

Duomo seen at the end of
a quiet nighttime street

I had given my self the entire following day to revisit Florence, my train back to Rome not leaving until 5:30 p.m.  I made the pilgrimage I always make when in Florence -- the half hour walk back up toward Fiesole, to Villa San Paolo.  Florence really hasn't changed much, physically.  The buildings remain the same.  There are more traffic lights.  The buses are newer -- you no longer enter the rear entrance and pay your fare (30 lire, or about 5 U.S. cents) to a little man sitting at a small desk who gives you a flimsy ticket.  The local people are better dressed, but still conservatively dressed by today's standards.  The residential streets seem to carry less traffic than I recall from past visits.

Street approaching Villa
San Paolo

But the downtown streets -- the area where the tourists gather -- are much different in their usage (but not their appearance), from the streets I first remember.  Like then, of course, most of those streets have very narrow pedestrian sidewalks -- wide enough for only one person to pass.  But my memories are of streets crowded with motor vehicles, and of one's difficulty keeping on the sidewalk and out of the traffic.  The traffic flow around the Duomo was always heavy.  Mary McCarthy devotes much of the first chapter of her The Stones of Florence (1956) to the horrors of Florentine traffic.

Those who try to sight-see discover the traffic hazard.  The sidewalks are mere tilted rims on the edge of the building fronts; if you meet another person coming toward you, you must swerve into the street; if you step backward onto the pavement to look up at a palace, you will probably be run over.

Now, motor traffic is barred from virtually all of the downtown.  Necessarily so, I would imagine, because the tourist pedestrian traffic fills the streets.  The increase in tourism since my first stay in Florence is almost unbelievable.  Florence has always attracted tourists.  E. M. Forster wrote his novel about tourism in Florence, A Room with a View, in 1908.  But in 1961, tourists were still isolated individuals.  I was always surprised to hear an American accent; I was delighted once when an American approached me and asked me directions in halting Italian.  Today, the areas around the Duomo and the Palazzo Vecchio are beehives swarming with tourists, tourists with American accents, as are most of the nearby streets around them.

Villa San Paolo

And yet, move but two or three blocks even farther away, and the pedestrian traffic is minimal.  I'm not sure how the motor traffic was banished without serious inconvenience to residents -- there must be parking lots outside the city limits.  I would expect to see a large expansion of public transit, just to fill the needs of local residents, but the bus lines appear about the same as they were decades ago, with no more buses on the streets. 

But, whatever the sacrifice of convenience by the local people, from the tourist's perspective the abolition of motor traffic has been a great gift.  The magnitude of today's tourism would hardly be possible without it.

But I long ago digressed!  The walk to Villa San Paolo was much as I recall it as a student.  The villa itself has long ago been taken over for other uses, and since the last time I was in Florence, ten years ago, access has been barred with a locked gate.  I had to take my souvenir photos through narrow slots in the gate.  The church below the villa is still functioning, and still looks oddly modernistic.  The little tobacco shop, a block or so away, where we students bought our soap, toothpaste, and postage stamps, is now gone, but I could hardly expect the city to remain frozen in time circa 1961.

Parish church adjoining
Villa San Paolo

When I visit Villa San Paolo, I often continue up the road past the villa to the little hilltop town of Fiesole, but I had too little time this year, and the temperature -- although ten degrees or so cooler than I had experienced in Rome -- still deterred me from setting out on a long, uphill walk.  I returned downtown.

In 1961 -- and even much later -- the Duomo and other churches of historical importance were wide open to the public.  You just walked in and looked around.  On several visits to Florence, I climbed stairs to the top of the dome, enjoying the view.  Now, there are lines everywhere.  Church authorities finally concluded, I gather, that their churches are not only places of worship but also historical monuments.  And fees for admission are therefore charged.  Which is reasonable.  Neither the church nor the city has an obligation to provide amusement to their visitors without asking some compensation -- but it makes sight-seeing less spontaneous.

The Uffizi Museum, home of world-famous Renaissance art, has always charged admission, of course.  But you used to pay your minimal admission fee, enter, and wander about in the company of a small group of fellow visitors.  In 2019, on the other hand, the line outside the Uffizi was too discouragingly long to even consider joining.

Statue of "Fernando the Great"
staring down the street at
the Duomo

In one of Mary McCarthy's other books, this one a novel, Birds of America (1964), she has her protagonist, a teenage college student, vent his frustration with the crowds of tourists milling about the floor of the Sistine Chapel in Rome.  He notes that the congestion simply means that no one is able to contemplate the art work in a manner that makes the visit worthwhile.  He suggests to an unsympathetic professor that admission to major architectural and artistic sites should be by competitive examination, with a certain number of places reserved for admission by lottery (to add a non-elitist element to the program).  Like the boy, I find the idea attractive in the same way that I find feudalism attractive -- by assuming that I myself would be one of the privileged few.

But, seriously, visiting a museum or famous church in the company of a few other visitors is a different experience from being forced to struggle your way through a crowd.  The decreased value of the experience is real, but I -- unlike McCarthy's young Peter Levi -- have no solution to put forth.


Quiet street in the Oltrarno

In my remaining time before returning to Rome, I followed the Arno river downstream, past the Teatro Comunale, where I saw "West Side Story" as a student, performed as part of Florence's annual Maggio Musicale festival.  I then crossed a bridge over the Arno to the quiet "Oltrarno" section of the city, hiked back on up to the Ponte Vecchio, crossed back, and collapsed into a chair at an outdoor café, where I lingered happily over a late lunch. 

Ever since I was a student, Florence has woven its way in and out of my life, each time I've returned to Italy.  We've become pretty good friends.  We plan to get together again soon.