No hope for spontaneous tourism but it's still special

It is hardly a chore to spend a long weekend in Florence and, at this time of year, the autumnal climate is at least clearly just that, rather than the early onset winter gloom we get in Britain to chime with ghouls and ghosts and ghastly trick and treaters at Halloween. It is still however, high season for tourism, especially other Italians on the Ognisanti holiday weekend and planning is unfortunately required to avoid the huge queues at all but the most obscure sites.  Restaurants are heaving although booking there at least does seem relatively easy by this late stage of a poverty stricken year and we ate deliciously, centrally, and if not cheaply due to seasonal wonders, the earthy corruption of white truffles most notably, certainly on local Tuscan treats. Paoli, in the Via del Tavolini, produced huge raw vegetable salads where the truffles were mandolined to drifts of papery slices matched with the thinnest discs of zucchini.  Il Pennello in the Via Dante produced garlic laden vongole in broth and a slightly less successful peposa, the long cooked and determinedly gristly beef stew that is the signature of of Impruneta, a village now almost overtaken by the city of Florence. The Osteria Caffe Italiano, almost next to glorious Vivoli’s, the ice cream dream of forever, in the Via Isole delle Stinche, provided such enormous cannon balls of the freshest buffalo mozzarella that it was almost impossible to eat anything else.

We did manage to see enough to fill our weekend more satisfactorily than standing in the longest ever lines waiting to see the wonders of the interior of Santa Croce. The Giotto frescoes, unlike many others always attributed to him seem not yet to have been debunked as his work.  As my daughter said, why not leave it alone even if the art history scholars of the past like Bernard Berenson did occasionally make some curious attributions that have well deserved their later questioning. The glorious Ghirlandaio frescoes in the Sassetti Chapel were conversely quite deserted by tourists, the church surrounded by ongoing roadworks that are presumably ruining the lives of the grand traders in the Via Tornabuoni, one of the grandest shopping streets in Florence. Like so many similar products of wealthy sponsors of the 14^th and 15^th centuries endowing churches with great works of art and securing, they anticipated, by their pious acts and pious images, their place amongst the blessed, chapels like this are almost too rich to take in during the usual brief visit and need either revisiting regularly or at least a pair of binoculars and lying on the floor to view delights towards the high arched ceiling. 

The Uffizzi gallery is of course quite out of the question for the impulsive unplanned tourist unless you enjoy queuing – you must book online well in advance.  Advice we had failed to take ourselves when visiting Arezzo to see the Piero della Francesca, Story of the True Cross in the Bacci Chapel of the church of San Francesco.  We were lucky only to have to wait a drinking, shopping hour and a half to get in amongst the holiday crowds.  These frescoes stick in my mind from first sight when I was 12 as some of the most extraordinary anywhere, not I suspect only for the luminescence of Piero’s painting, the light on the Emperor Constantine as he dreams his famous dream, but also for the romance of the story of St Helena and the true cross. Fairy story, apocryphal nonsense or anything you will, it is a delicious tale, told best by Evelyn Waugh who has Helena as the daughter of old King Cole – that merry old monarch. Here again there is too much to see at once, one can take only an impression in the time allowed for viewing and there is little space for lying on the floor but what an impression it is and how it stays in the mind’s eye. The solidly beautiful young woman in a green dress, Piero’s Mary Magdalen, crowded by the 18^th century tomb of Bishop Tarlati into a corner on the wall of the Duomo offers a closer view of his work, silvery light falling on the glass jar of ointment, the individual strands of her loosed hair falling over the shoulders of her cloak.

On from Arezzo and more off the beaten track into the Tuscan hills and Tuscan industrial areas these days too.  First the little hill town of Monterchi, for a sight only of the supreme serenity of the Madonna del Parto, Piero’s pregnant Mary in the guise of a 15^th century noble woman standing under her canopy or what remains of it after careful amputations of a 1911 addition during its most recent and long lasting restoration.  This picture has, aside from its compelling beauty, a history of change and movement that mirrors the wars and past traumas that have shaken even so apparently peaceful part of the world.  When I first saw it, it had been returned from sanctuary with a private family to the cemetery chapel for which it was painted.  It was almost impossible to believe such very unsplendid isolation, ignored too and still so one suspects by tourist groups for whom the diversion is not considered ‘vaut le voyage’. On to San Sepolcro, Piero della Francesco’s birthplace, the grim outskirts of the town at least somewhat left behind the great walls of the ancient centre where the Museo Civico is home to the painting many consider Piero’s greatest, his Resurrection.  Christ here is very much a man, solid too to match the Magdalen, only his face, impassive, his thoughts beyond the reach or understanding of the viewer.  The Roman guards, the SP of SPQR just visible on a red tunic, are slumbering peacefully beside the opened tomb as all eyes are drawn to the great live figure above. During World War II the town was saved from destruction by a Royal Artillery officer who stopped the allied firing in order to save this painting.

Here too is the polyptych of the Madonna of the Misericordia, currently somewhat dismantled as it undergoes a major restoration.  Those panels reassembled glow anew, their gold background echoing earlier masters like Duccio, the monumental Virgin Mary with her sheltering cloak,  a precursor to Piero’s less formal, most human, later figures. The Museum is truly a treasure house, the well known fragment of fresco of St Julian here too and an unhappy looking St Ludovico di Tolosa, the 13^th century Bishop Louis of Toulouse, whose family included a remarkable crop of generally royal saints and who seems to have fitted a lot in to a short life, since he died aged 23.  Besides such wonders there are della Robbia’s galore as also in Arezzo. Remarkable works indeed although one can sometimes have too much polychrome terracotta, like too much mozzarella, however delicious, for easy digestion.

We stayed in Florence bang in the centre in the Hotel Calzaiuoli, just by the Duomo and the Piazza della Repubblica, an hotel with all the attributes of far grander establishments aside from cost and including the sort of breakfasts, greed aside, that one could live on all day. The staff too create the hospitable but dignified air of the best old fashioned Italian hotels where the service was always the selling point over and above an understated elegance that might not suit so well the flashy expectations of today’s oligarchic travellers.  As for shopping, little time in truth for more than soap and shoes, a new provider of the former, a different, less well known Farmacia, competing, most successfully in my view with the well known scented heaven of the Farmacia Santa Maria Novella, a church that we also successfully visited after watching the queues disappearing as we ate gnudi, creamy balls of ricotta and spinach, from a comfortable vantage point in a nearby restaurant.