There is a place so magical and bright that even the distant memory of my first visit to the place brings a nostalgic tear to my increasing short-sighted eye.
I was 22 years old that first time, a virgin whose senses were opened to a place of raw beauty and carnal lust. I had already visited a large chunk of continental Europe, but a well-heeled peninsula had remained thus far elusive. Finally, accompanied by my well-equipped and internet-advised travel companions, Motherbear and AG, we made the treacherous journey over the Alps and down into onto the Elysian Fields below. The fertile green albeit mosquito-ridden fields that entice the uninitiated innocents with their siren call of opera, the syrupy peppery elixir of the olive and the most delicious bloody tomatoes on earth. The place where men, proper good-looking ones not construction labourers, call out to girls like me as my long hair trails in the wind…Bella! A nation where men are men*, they have facial hair and muscly exposed arms, and are masculine enough to wear pink polo shirts and white loafers or the most immaculately tailored suits designed by their countrymen Giorgio and Ermenegildo and still not appear gay.
Five minutes in town and I've discovered the food
That testosterone charged place is Italy. The Mediterranean Boot kicking France and the rest of Europe far away from its azure watered coast, owning the sunshine, the sea and the sensuous south.
Pig in all it's forms, be sure to sew up the mouth...
Frequent visitors to the ongoing saga of M will know that my last visit to Italy was cut tragically short by the separation with the F-Word. His opening argument was, “I do not want to go to Florence on Saturday”. Italy being such a hedonistic dreamland fantasy for me, I was more devastated not see Florence than his leaving me. I was devastated that my love of this warm, sensual country would forever be tainted by the memory of his cold dismissal.
The Farmacia Santa Maria Novella... love potion?
It took me a little over 6 months, but I made it back. I went to Florence; I had a room with a view, a view almost of the Arno and completely of the Ponte Vecchio and I spent three sun-drenched glorious days eating and drinking and sleeping and walking and relaxing and wishing.
Italian Humour
The Body, a most excellent friend blessed with brains, beauty and a job that pays her to live temporarily in the Tuscan capital, has been living the highlife in the ochre-hued town I first discovered on screen in the Merchant Ivory adaptation of E.M. Forster’s, A Room with a View. The film that would make a star of Helena Bonham Carter as well as of her long mane of tumbling brown curls. I loved the cream marbled scenery, I fell girlishly in love with Rupert Graves who plays the younger brother, and any movie blessed with the twin RSC trained acting talent of Judi Dench and Maggie Smith is sure to leave it’s mark on a teenage girl obsessed with BBC bonnet dramas. It did, and in 2007 I first made my pilgrimage to the Arno and the ancient city straddling its banks. It was only two days, but in 48 hours I managed to take in the greatest hits of Italian art, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Titian and Caravaggio before leaving all too soon and desperate to return.
Neptune surveys his domain
This time, recovered from the distress of my last operatic Italian adventure, I was determined to indulge, to enjoy, not to plan, and just take it all in…
On the first day, a three-course lunch in a restaurant that most definitely had a view preceded a three-course dinner with The Body that was preceded by a bottle of Champagne and followed by drinks in a Terrazzo. If you’ve been reading this for longer than a month you are well acquainted with the Herculean strength of my much-abused liver and my passion for too much very good cheese. Truffles, mozzarella, a piece of beef grilled and served only with salt, rosemary dusted potatoes and the creamiest Tiramisu; I mean really, how is it that just one narrow nation can lay claim to so much deliciousness, and that is only the food! The verdant freshness of Pinot Grigio, the spicy warmth of Brunello and the honey-like syrup Vin Santo accompanied by biscotti that you steep in the glass in lieu of a heavier dessert all serve to remind you that it was in fact the Italians who taught the French how to make wine.
The view...over the Arno
The city itself is so beautiful, I can’t pretend to have the words to describe it, and besides, many of you I am sure have seen it before. That so many spectacular Palazzos and marble statue dotted Piazzi could be crammed into a space that requires only a couple of hours to discover on foot is truly incredible. That it has remained largely intact after all those wars, Mussolini and even Berlusconi, is astounding. Every street corner opens up onto another ancient church or some other medieval treasure. David’s steely gaze watches over the crowded hoards in at least three different open spaces in the city. Lovers meander along the lanes, couture-clad women walk about to buy bread and the omnipresent river of American tourists queue to buy pizza and diet-coke only to complain that the pizzas don’t taste like ‘real pizza’.
David surveys Florence from high above at the Piazzale Michelangelo
And then there are the Italians.
If the Italians created the Catholic Church and there is a God to be prayed to in their myriad ornate marble churches then that God must be seated upon a white moulded plastic chair. Some time after the Italians discovered plastic instead of marble, they decided that all chairs should be moulded from one pristine piece of white plastic and that those chairs should be sent forth into the world beyond heralding the Italian Diaspora, most especially in their restaurants that serve anything at all with a giant Black Pepper Grinder.
Pure white, pure plastic, pure Italian
Italians have managed to perfect the art of good living. In France, good living is the logical outcome of their revolutionary individualism. Taking time for a lingering lunch is as much a right as it is a desire to sit and spend two hours eating. In Italy, shaky economy and shakier political scene, they’ve got so much less to lose. A laid-back lifestyle is an antidote to the insanity of their daily evermore-corrupt reality as it is a traditional way of life. And the way the men look at you…I’d risk the safety of my pseudo-socialist Gallic ghetto for a lifetime of “bella!” as I wander the corsos, the vias and the piazzas.
Perfetto!
The Italians are so unaware of how lucky they are to be native in a country rich from its freezing alpine north to the corrupt sunburnt south with baroque beauty and culinary delights that they’ve become totally oblivious. During that first lunch, I sat in a restaurant that looked over the river straight at the Uffizi. The Uffizi is the veritable home of Italian art. Nowhere in Italy is there a larger and more diverse collection, spearheaded by the big-as-your-living-room Venus di Botticelli, she of the long blond hair and wobbly thighs sprouting from within a clamshell.
Even the intercoms are bellissimo
As I stared out across the water wondering what Firenze might have looked or smelled like at the time of Sandro and his probable working girl Venus, I noticed a group of ten men playing five-a-side football, sweating and running, bouncing and kicking, cheering and jeering, all against the wall of the Uffizi. That a young misty-eyed girl from Sydney would have travelled across the globe just to visit this one place lost on a group of men who use the foreground of the art world’s Mecca to square up for a bit of Friday afternoon fun. That paintings preserved for 500 years are holed up in the darkened corridors of the Uffizi does not register for the average Florentine. Everything is old, everything is beautiful, the food is always this good, and besides, given the state of the Euro, they’ve got bigger problems to ponder.
Footballers in front of the Uffizi
With my Italian first name, my brown curls and my rounded Botticelli belly, I’ve often been mistaken for an Italian; it should be noted that a good portion of Sydney’s residents have an Italian ancestor or six. While I am the daughter of a post-war immigrant, he came from the conservative United Kingdom and not the sultry Roman Empire. I do love tomatoes, I do love two women, one named Madonna and another named Florence and if I was cursed to only ever eat one thing for the rest of my days I might just choose the aniseed crunch of fennel. With my just-too-loud voice, my hands as punctuation when I talk and my penchant for melodrama, I might just be re-born of some ancient woman of Toscana.
Whatever your take, mine is that after three days in the sun, the dog days are most definitely over
The View from The Body's Room.
* So much so that their former president is better know for his libido than his legislation. Bunga Bunga!
Feels like I just had a 5 minute holiday. Thanks!
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