Florence's "film"

Stepping out of Villa San Paolo, through the gate, and on to the winding street, via della Piazzola, I experienced a sensation perhaps new to me, but one felt often by first-time visitors to Italy.

Goethe had felt a vague sense of bewildered incredulity ... when, as a starry-eyed northerner, he finally arrived in Rome.  As he writes on November 1, 1786, "I was still afraid I might be dreaming; it was not till I had passed through the Porta del Popolo that I was certain it was true, that I really was in Rome."  A few lines later, he adds: "All the dreams of my youth have come to life; the first engravings I remember -- my father hung views of Rome in the hall -- I now see in reality, and everything I have known for so long -- is now assembled before me.  Wherever I walk, I come upon familiar objects in an unfamiliar world."

I was part of a group of forty university students, beginning a six-month stay on an overseas branch campus.  It had been a long flight from San Francisco to Milan in a chartered DC-6, with refueling stops in Montreal and Shannon, Ireland.  We had arrived at Milan in the dark, and immediately transferred to a bus, riding in the dark to Florence.  We arrived at our new campus at about 2 a.m. on Easter morning.  Our eyes were pressed against the bus windows as we lumbered through the twisting streets of the Florentine outskirts, but could make out little in the dark.

It was my first trip to Italy -- my first trip out of North America.  Like Goethe, I had long been strongly attracted to Italy, but it was all from second hand experiences:  My grandmother's painting in her home of the Rialto Bridge in Venice.  Evocative illustrations of an imagined classical Rome in my high school Latin book.  Stories set in post-war Italy in the neo-Realism Italian films then popular in college towns.

But it wasn't until dawn, when about half our student group emerged tentatively from the villa on our way around the block to attend Easter mass at a local church, that I had my Goethe moment.  A woman, dressed all in black, was standing on her front step, sweeping dust into the narrow street with an ancient broom, a collection of twigs, actually.  I found myself walking through a Vittorio de Sica film set.  I was really in Florence, really in Italy, really in a world unlike anything I'd known.

Events of the next few days only accentuated this feeling.  Visiting the little tabaccheria a block or so from the villa to buy toothpaste ("col-GAH-tay") and hand soap ("pal-mo-LEE-vay").  We had taken a six-credit course in intensive Italian the prior quarter -- now we had to put it to use.  Because no one with whom we had to deal spoke English.  Not even workers whose job involved tourists.

Taking the bus that Easter afternoon from the school to the center of town -- back then, you boarded through the back of the bus and gave your 30 lire fare to a little man sitting at a desk by the door.  He gave you a flimsy paper ticket that no one ever looked at again.  Stopping at a café near the city center and ordering a liter of wine for our group of four or five.  Did we dare, I asked myself?  Half our group was under 21.  No one cared!  No one asked for an ID.  No one even raised a skeptical eyebrow, revealing that he was going along with our little scheme against his better judgment.  Almost as astounding as being served as minors was being allowed to drink at a table on the sidewalk.  Outdoors!  In full view of the public, including small children.!

I was only partially naïve.  I had seen enough movies to have some idea of how life was lived in Italy.  But seeing it all in a movie at a Palo Alto theater was far different from living it.

At the time, during those six months, I felt sorry for the "older generation," most of whom seemed to visit Europe -- if they did at all -- in American Express tour buses.  And, although more tolerant of differences among people now, I still do.  Life isn't the same from a bus window, or while being passively herded about by a tour guide.  As André Aciman, who also wrote the quotation above, has noted in the same recent essay:¹

Visiting a place is not necessarily the experience of it  The real experience is the resonance, the "pre-image," the afterimage, the interpretation of experience, the distortion of experience, the struggle to experience the experience.  What we do when we think about experience, even when we don't exactly know what to make of it, is itself already experience.  It's the radiance we project onto things and that things radiate back to us that constitutes experience.

As Aciman has explained elsewhere, "my Florence" isn't just observing an impressive collection of architecture and paintings, or even drinking wine in a sidewalk café.  My experiences -- both as a child, hearing about Florence, and as a student struggling to find my way about Florence, asking for train tickets in broken Italian, understanding how to cash a check in an Italian bank -- and again, as an adult reflecting back on those student experiences and testing them against my observations during subsequent visits -- all combine to produce "my Florence."  A Florence that is unique to me, but that has enough in common with that of others as to make conversations with them about student travel a study in nostalgia.

Aciman explains this process as the creation of a "film."  Our own experiences with a place, or that we bring to a place, create a "film" about the place, a film that makes that place our own.  Without that film, a city is just bunch of buildings and streets.  We modify the physical reality of a city by the film in which we encase it, a film that then draws us to that city, and makes it a place in which we feel both comfortable and alive. 

Those are thoughts whose truth we all sensed, from the first day we were there -- although truths we would have expressed less fervently and eloquently, perhaps.  As one of our group remarked near the end of our six months, "You know, we will all probably come back here again in the future, but it will never be the same.  We'll be tourists, not Florentine residents."  Her comment suggested a little overseas campus snobbery, one that we all felt, but of course she was right. Even if Florence objectively were to be unchanged, "my Florence" would be different.  "My Florence" is never a completed structure -- it evolves with every new visit, or every book I read about the city, or every news story that originates there.

Four of us spent our last week in Europe, before flying back home, in Paris.  After arrival by train, we took the Metro to the Boulevard Saint-Germain, where the school had booked us hotel rooms.  I walked out of the subway, onto the Boulevard, and once again felt like I was on a movie set.  An American in Paris.  I almost danced down the sidewalk, hearing Gershwin in my head.  My friends laughed, and told me to calm down.  But I was already constructing "my Paris," spreading my own "film" about it.

Italy, my Italy, is magnificent, but in this way not unique. 

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¹André Aciman, Homo Irrealis, "In Freud's Shadow, Part 1" (2021)