Late Morning
As befitting a slight case of jet lag, I woke up at 5:00 this morning and never did get back to sleep. I finally rolled out of bed around 7:00, had a nice leisurely breakfast and headed out into pleasant and sunny morning.
While the are some errands that I need to get done at some point today, I wanted to use the morning to acclimate to being back here. There's actually a pattern to this. I pick out a few favorite places, go to them, and then sit quietly for long stretches and keep my eyes open.
As always, I headed first to the Ponte Vecchio. It was early enough so that there were few people around, mostly just the shopkeepers who were scrubbing the steps in front of their kiosks. This is a fine old Italian tradition. Any tour of a traditional Italian neighborhood, even those in America, usually reveals a number of older people scrubbing down the stone steps as though this were somehow necessary. On this particular morning, there were enough shopkeepers involved in this tradition to soak the entire length of road that runs across the Old Bridge.
I headed through the Uffizi corridor to the loggia overlooking the Piazza do Signoria. This is hands down the best people watching place in all of Florence. I have spent countless hours over the years sitting on its stone benches and photographing tourists. My reason for doing this is part of a honed down aesthetic. I used to come to Europe and shoot mostly places. When I went to Cannes in 2006, I started gravitating toward people. That festival is a real melting pot. People come from all over the world to be seen and I found that I enjoyed photographing that need.
The real turning point, though, was in Barcelona the following year. I went to Sagrada Familia, the gargantuan and truly bizarre (mostly) Gaudi-designed basilica. A mishmash of the ancient and the modern, the sacred and the profane, it doesn't inspire worship so much as gawking. While sitting in front of the church I began to notice the way people were looking at it. Before I knew it, I had taken thirty or more photos of people staring slack jawed and trying to process how they were supposed to respond to what they were seeing. Almost immediately, a theme started to tie my pictures together: I photograph people in the act of discovery. I sit outside highly discoverable places then wait for people to register what they are looking at.
A subset of this are the photos I take of people posing for others. I've found that the more someone puts their attention on one camera the more the reveal to another. By shooting from a point other than where they are putting their attention, all kinds of dynamics are revealed. One example is a shot I got in Salzburg last year. A young man was posing in front of Mozart's house for a friend who was taking his time getting his camera lined up. My shot, taken slightly off the bias, reveals an air of sadness that I know the final posed shot never would have found.
In any event, I sat in the loggia for about an hour, getting shots of the Asian tourists who flock to this city in packs. Afterward, I walked over to Santa Croce.
I always manage to end up there whenever I come to Florence. It is, among other things, one of the world's great crypts. Buried here are people like Michelangelo, Dante, Galileo, and just about any other famous Italian you would care to name. My real reason, for returning, though, is not the need to visit a bunch of graves. It is the Brunelleschi Cloisters. This is an extraordinary reflecting area just off to the side of the nave. It is also one of the undiscovered gems of Florence. I call it undiscovered because in the numerous hours I have spent there I would bet that I haven't seen more than a total of ten people stop by to look. And look is all they ever do. They crane their necks around the gate, maybe take a picture or two, then leave with a shrug.
What I love about the Cloisters is the silence of it. It may be the quietest spot in all of Florence. What makes this remarkable is the fact that on the other side of it is the Piazza di Santa Croce, surely one of the loudest. None of the street sounds ever make it over top of the two story open structure. Today I sat for nearly a half hour and all I heard was the chirping of birds.
Somehow I got it into my head that I wanted to go up the hill to the Bardini Gardens, mostly because the view of the city is so spectacular from that vantage point. I started across the Arno and had my first bride sighting of this trip. Brides and grooms are an omnipresent sight around here. Most are trailed by a photographer who gets shots of them in front of one monument or another. In this particular case, it was a pleasant young Japanese couple who were using the Ponte Vecchio as a backdrop.
My plan to go up the hill hit a snag. Actually the snag was going up the hill. I had deliberately avoided the route that I knew because the road up is insanely steep. My hope was that this approach would be different. It was. It was much steeper. I started up, but when I heard a car behind me straining to make the grade I knew my legs were not going to fare much better.
I had been wondering if I would see any impact of the economic downturn. Unfortunately, the evidence is apparent. Florence is a fragile city. It's ornamental work is hundreds of years old and the stucco with which most buildings are covered has a relatively short shelf life. One of the first things to be cut in the budget is the funding for ongoing restoration. The Cloisters is in serious need of new stucco and the Ponte Vecchio needs both plaster work and a paint job on its eastern wall. It is amazing how fast such deterioration takes place. Everything looked great just last year.
Late Afternoon
My tasks were accomplished with surprising ease. I say surprising because one required getting a train ticket for Orbetello for tomorrow and the other necessitated getting money from an ATM. Normally getting a train ticket at Firenze SMN requires standing in a very long line. Today, for some reason, no one was there. I walked straight up to the window, got my ticket and was out of there in less than five minutes.
The ATM was even easier. The amount of money any individual machine is willing to dispense is entirely up to the way that machine has been programmed. Some have limits as low a 100 Euros while others will handout 500 Euros without complaint. Which machine you get is something of a crap shoot. For some reason, the one I picked was willing to let me take out the money I needed so that I could pay the La Scaletta in cash. This is preferred since they offer a 10% discount when you do this.
With a little more time on my hands than I thought I was going to have, I decided to go to the Cappelle Medicee. I had been there once before and had always thought about going back. A final resting place for serval of the Medici family, its use of the term "chapel" can't help but seem like false modesty. This chapel is huge with a dome second only to the duomo at Santa Maria dell' Fiore a few blocks away. Here, the green marble walls shoot up nearly 80 feet until they meet the windows that in turn support the dome. Right now, the west wall is coved with scaffolding, the result of renovation work whose need became apparent when a large section of marble fell in 1999 (the east wall was covered the last time I was here).
Down a short corridor from this is a simpler but more interesting chapel. Actually the crypt for the brothers Lorenzo and Giulio di Medici, this one was designed by Michelangelo who also completed the crypt for Lorenzo as well as the Madonna and Child that is flanked by Raffaelo's statues of the two brothers. Michelangelo's crypt for Lorenzo is quite unique. While the female figure, the sarcophagus and the body of the male figure have the buttery soft feel and exquisitely detailed musculature of his David, the head of the male is incomplete. I've heard a number of reasons for this - Michelangelo stopped working on it when he moved to Rome, he frequently left a work uncompleted when he felt he had given it all he could, or because he thought it said what it had to say in its incomplete form. Whatever reason is given, I'm sure there is an art historian somewhere who believes that his or her reason is the true one.
After contemplating this quandary, I walked over to Santa Maria dell' Fiore then back to the loggia in the Piazza di Signoria. I took up my usual space on top of the wall next to the statue of Perseus slaying Medusa and looked for interesting faces. Whereas the piazza was very quiet this morning, now it was bustling with tour groups. There were so many of them bumping into each other that I started to wonder if I had stumbled into a convention for the blind.
Suddenly there was a commotion coming from the nearby Uffizi corridor. I turned to see maybe five or six young street merchants clutching their goods to their chests and bolting past the loggia. Clearly the police had arrived and these were vendors without a license. The kid at the back of this line was carrying a box of sunglasses. As he passed just below me, he tripped on the cobblestone and the contents of his box went flying. He just kept running. Faster than the blink of an eye, a group of tourists sitting on the long bench at the base of the loggia leapt up and scrambled for all the sunglasses. Once they had secured as many as they could, each one retreated back to the bench and put on their best "No, I didn't see who took those sunglasses" look.
Yet another good reason to shoot tourists.
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