To imagine the visit of a city like Florence means to remebering of foggy associations on the route: Dante - Renaissance - Tuscany - Medici family - Ponte Vecchio and others. To visit Florence means adding a whole range of contemporary features to these general places, including the fact that just next to the truly Renaissance masterpiece - Santa Maria del Fiore Cathedral - today is Old Stove, the most famous Irish pub in the city.
A visit to any museum, in the classical meaning, is a unique experience of the past removed from the context and placed in a closed environment in which often the government feels silent silence and unpleasant frustration. However, in museums such as Florence, this past lives in parallel with the present of the city and all those elements that give it the attributes of modern and urban.
I realized this coming out of Via Ricasoli, which leads to Duomo Cathedral. At that moment, the pale silhouette of a passenger plane appeared in the sky above the famous Brunellesian dome; from a nearby street - penetrating into the column one at a time, next to a parked scooter - a group of Japanese tourists headed for the church led by a man raised his arm in a carpeted antenna, which served as an orientation point.
The street vendor of the black road, one from a group scattered around the square, slowed down by offering me fake Gucci, Dolce Gabana and Prada bags at 25 euros, lowering the price already at the next moment, when I stepped forward to pass by. During that time, a few visitors of the café Buca Nicolini, located at the very corner, stood filling their espresso, calmly, as if they were not at all there. The whole scene was supplemented by several ambulance circles, which were deployed near the Giotto’s bell tower and St. John the Baptist, in case some of the tourists collapsed exhausted by the long wait in order to enter.
In front of the Paradise door of the Baptistery is a huge crowd. What is it that attracts people to photograph themselves right in front of them? They were, however, only a copy of the original gates that fell into a terrible flood, in November 1966, when Arno reached a level of over 4 meters in the city itself.
Despite of all the efforts of the restorer, all the efforts of the restaurateur, despite of his authenticity in the choice of material, the technique of making, the three-dimensional character of the characters from the Old Testament, the copied perspective, and the details of the motifs, between them and the small goods of the Senegalese sellers, in essence, there is no difference. Their name, which should be associated with paradise, is also debatable. Michelangelo gave it to him, in one of the rare moments when he swallowed his suit and admitted that their author Giberti was a bigger artist than him. On the other hand, the material from which it is made is gold plated bronze, not gold, as most think.
Obsessed with this kind of thinking, I surpassed the threshold of the Duomo, the fourth largest Catholic chapel in the world. Missing in her womb, I felt in my own self a weird reflex, as it appears to me only in situations of remarkable excitement: a sudden, short and pleasant cramp in the stomach that suddenly splits into the left and right side of the belly around the belt, rejoins at the bottom of the back, then rattles with the spine and scatters at the height of the scalp. Pure stage of fright, nothing more, of course.
The inside of the Duom - its magnificent gothic emptiness, before which man at the moment diminishes itself to the limit of irrelevance - is one of those ideal places that allow for intact introspection. Regardless of the extraordinary acoustics of the interior, my hearing turned completely to the inside, and it was so hard that at one moment it seemed to me that in such a space I could hear the heartbeats of my own heart. The sun, which with its various inertia illuminated narrow and slender windows, seemed to sterile on them a fullness and become an irresistible magnet for the eyes with which colorful light played merciless game. Unlike the people who walked alongside me as if they were on the promenade, I stood looking at the netheses around me, absorbing that ambient and feeling that the previous associations about the Duo finally replaced the concrete impressions and how to consciously place me in the black and white vision and projection immerse images and short films of the exterior and interior of the Duo in color.
So this is what will be remembered from now on!
Cafe Paszkowski is a fine Florentine restaurant with orchestras and has existed since 1846. The view from the summer garden is provided to one of the more important nodes in the city, the Piazza della Republica, a square that has undergone some architectural changes over time, but it has remained the same with the spirit. It is one of those places where the lives of everyday people have been crossed for centuries, in their fullness and diversity. At the moment when the waiter brought Secondi Piatti, the main dish, three musicians of emigrant origin appeared on the square. The orchestra they represented was composed of double bass, accordion and guitar.
(Later, I managed to find out that the mentioned trio is called "Rom Draculas" and have the status of a local tourist-entertaining attribute as well as several recorded albums sold during their street performances). After a shy start, which looked more like a joint drift after a long break, a marvelous blend of jazz, fancy and latino rhythm came to the square, alongside the virtuoso solo accordion, which at some point went to the final improvisation, in order to be in the next all the instruments collided in the dark of the three chords, returning to the beginning, which was at the same time the end of the composition. The people who were in the square accepted this little open concert with spontaneity that fascinated me. An street painter made a drawings of the musicians, surrounding ice cream and souvenir sellers played with a contagious rhythm that filled the square, and a few young mothers put their coins in the coin of the euro to their children, sending them freely to the box for the guitar in which they were collected Contributions. The bright atmosphere that people in Florence know to make unplanned and literally from nothing, testifies how great their spirit is.
Leaving the Piazza della Republica, I headed towards Ponte Vecchio, the oldest bridge in Florence. For him, the Florentines say that he is a paradise for women, and a hell for men, due to the number of goldsmiths that are found on him today. Trying through the crowd next to the numerous showcases, it was hard for me to imagine that meat was once used in this place and that in today's small sailboats squeezed on both sides of the outer bridge of the bridge once used to be a bachelor, who offered their products to citizens and travelers to the intentions . The bridge today is the place where a trade of some completely different kind takes place, and on which men often pay expensive marital disagreements.
