Florence.
I’ve wanted to write this piece for a while; to be precise, since I first stumbled, gawping, into the Piazza del Duomo, Florence, about this time a year ago. The trip came on the back of a tough few weeks in London. I had to miss a day of it because of a sodding interview in the City, and I’d brought a little keepsake from home: a malicious, bulging ulcer searing angrily at the slightest brush. I was tired and thick-headed, with chewed fingernails and prickly red eyes. And the very instant I got to Florence, none of it mattered.
We took proper, bitterly delicious coffee at sundown. The hulking Duomo sat beside us, enormous walls drenched in fleshy pink and deep emerald and white mellowing into the dusk, and crusted with fleurs-de-lis and figures of stone. There was a grand old café across the road with shimmering chandeliers, vibrant gelato and slender, waistcoated baristas. Aged Florentines deftly wended tinkling bicycles over the cobbles. And the whole thing was set against the most glorious score: quiet, day’s end Italian chat, and a soaring oratorio of church bells. I gulped it all down as I did my restorative cuppa, and England became a remote, sodden, puddle-grey memory. Nothing else mattered but this mesmerising place of marbled, rococo class.
