Gardens

Hey all

Went to a library today (biblioteca) to do some study – the library had this terrace with a cafe and a whole bunch of tables. Not that many people know it is there – the girl that showed me the place said even a lot of Florentines don't know about it, so spent four hours studying – cigar, coffee etc – looking up from my books from time to time – the first photo is what you see from the terrace. I didn't set that shot up – that was sitting at a table and taking a snapshot in between conjugating verbs. The whole town is a museum/gallery – it just has people living in it. As opposed to Cairo, for example, which is a teeming and extraordinarily squalid city that happens to be near what the Egyptians seem to consider (and treat like) “that big cemetery at the edge of town”.

I planned to spend the whole day studying, but after four hours my brain could not take any more in so wandered around for a while – took a photo of a Benetton poster outside the Uffizi gallery – it kind of amused me – you can see a huge stupid moustache painted on to the portrait on the right, the one in the middle has a Hitler moustache scrawled over the top of it – in fact there were about five or six portraits of men that had been defaced – tear-drop tattoos, beards etc. But the whole Madonna thing that seems to apply to all women here is so strong that even the vandals respect it – note how the woman on the left has not been defaced; is pristine.

Eventually found myself at the Bardini gardens – the view from them was so lovely that I don't really want to try to write about it. If you sit there it is difficult to look at for long without getting a bit choked up. Then went to the Boboli gardens, had a cigar under a tree.

Will go back tomorrow when my head starts to hurt with all the words I am trying to stuff into it, because I realised when I got home and looked at a map that the Boboli is about five times bigger than I thought.

German opera singer called as I was heading home, wanting to know what was going on for the evening – we planned to wander in to the city and walk around, but got a text from an English girl from the school so German opera singer and myself met up with her and another couple of Germans, a couple of Spaniards, watched a pretty average guitarist play for an hour or so on the Ponte Vecchio, then came home via some piazza where everyone drank and I had yet another cigar.

It really is an extraordinary place. Was, for a time, the centre of the world – Dante, Macchiavelli, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Boccaccio – there is nothing like it in history with the one exception of that period in England which saw Shakespeare and Milton within a couple of generations. Was thinking about Dante today, after looking at his statue last night – was exiled in his thirties – which at the time really meant something – if you were not here, at the centre, then you were nowhere – no phones, facebook, skype, email. Nothing. Almost completely cut off from everyone that mattered – his life was over. Then in Canto IV of the Inferno, that is, less than five per cent of the way through writing a poem that as yet no one had read, there is a moment where he meets the shades of Homer, Ovid, Horace, Lucan – Virgil is already there – they greet him – they “made me one among them... I made a sixth amid such a store of wisdom.” It is a nice moment – but the thing is: he has barely started the Divine Comedy, has had his entire life fall apart, has been stripped of everything, and yet even then what is saying with this scene is: “Homer, Virgil, Ovid? I am that good.” Astonishing, when you stop to think about it. And a few cantos later he strongly implies that he is better than Ovid, or at least has more imagination.

Anyway, that was my day today. The photos that haven't been explained are steps up through the Bardini, and the tree I sat down under for a while in the Boboli.

Cheers, B.

PS – heard on a documentary once about how these big domes appear to float – it struck me as a ridiculous thing to say, given how monumental they are – and up close it is absurd – they are just so massive. But from the gardens today, looking down on the city, I could kind of see what they mean by that.

PPS – found out what the padlocks are for – it is couples in love.