Florence (10 page)

The move was planned carefully. First, in the summer of 1873, workmen laid a railroad track across the Piazza della Signoria. The track turned right on to Via de Calzaiuoli, rounded the Duomo and made a sharp left on to Via del Cocomero (Watermelon Street, later changed to Via Ricasoli) before reaching its terminus at the Accademia. Once the track was completed, the
David
was hoisted from
his pedestal and lowered into a sort of tramcar, the wooden scaffolding of which held him aloft so that his feet did not touch the ground. Finally, on 30 July, he began the journey to his new home – a journey that would last seven days, though the distance involved could be covered on foot in ten or fifteen minutes. In one of the few illustrations to be made of the move, a print published in
Nuova Illustrazione Universale
of January 1874, only the upper half of the
David’s
torso is visible above the wooden walls of the cart. His famous posture – head turned, eyes glancing hesitantly over the left shoulder – takes on new pathos in this image, as if what he is regarding with such worry is actually the gradual disappearance of the only home he has ever known.

Not everyone was happy about the move. ‘Michelangelo’s
David
in Piazza della Signoria is no more!!’ an unnamed journalist lamented in the
Giornale Artistico
of 1 August, 1873. ‘It’s been embalmed and seen in a new contraption of wood and iron on its way to its burial in the Cemetery of Art vulgarly called the Accademia di Belle Arti.’ A cartoon from the same period shows the
David
bending
down and leaning out of his crate in order to argue with the foppish, behatted men who have presumably orchestrated his removal. A letter written to the Minister of Public Education complained of the ‘degrading’ cart in which the
David
was enclosed – as if the rain and wind slowly eating away at his marble body were not, in a literal sense, far more degrading. And though the rhetoric died down once the
David
was safely ensconced at the
Accademia,
a lingering annoyance at the gap left in the piazza’s statuary remained, leading in 1910 (things move slowly in Florence) to the erection of the marble copy that today many tourists blithely confuse with the real thing.

Those who are more astute, of course, brave the long lines outside the Accademia in order to see
David
in his authentic and inimitable glory. Living as he does now in a tribune, one might expect him to have taken on an expression of arrogance, yet in fact – and despite the change of circumstance – his look of vulnerability seems only to have intensified over the years. Perhaps this is due to old age, a lingering ache in his left arm, or in the second toe of his left foot, which a vandal broke in 1991. To
invent such a motive, I know, is to assume that the statue has an identity distinct from that of the Biblical figure it represents, or even the marble from which it was hewn; indeed, it is to assume that the statue has a consciousness. And what might such a consciousness – at once freighted and fragile – possibly resemble? What kind of memory would stone possess? We can only imagine.

Like most people, I first went to Florence for its art. That initial visit, in 1982, lasted four days and amounted to an almost complete submersion in the city’s artistic heritage, a giddy alternation between heat and cool, sun-parched piazzas and churches so dark it took minutes for my eyes to adjust to them. By the time the four days were over, I had seen pretty much everything my art history professor had told me to see; I had squinted up at dozens of frescoes and altarpieces, and spent hours in the long corridors of the Uffizi; I had climbed the steep paths of the Boboli Gardens, and the operatic staircase (designed by Michelangelo) that leads to the Laurentian Library, and the spiral staircase that leads to the roof of the
Duomo. And how did I feel? Irritable, impatient, inadequate. Stendhal’s Syndrome: so completely did Florence’s superabundance of marvels throw off my equilibrium that at the end of my time there I decided to cut my summer vacation short and fly back to Palo Alto, drawn by a longing for those banal American things through which I hoped to restore some sense of who I was.

Living in Florence, of course, is an entirely different matter; then you almost never go to look at the art, unless a friend or relative happens to be visiting. One does not easily envision Ouida and Janet Ross and the other Anglo-Florentines making regular jaunts to the Pitti Palace; they were too busy squabbling and gossiping. By the same token, the contemporary foreigner’s life in Florence, though constantly impinged upon by a persistent if only half-articulate consciousness of art’s proximity, remains curiously remote from, one might even say immune to, the very patrimony that drew him in the first place. Not that the art disappears for him; it simply remains at the periphery of his imagination, awaiting the day when some unspecified incentive – the
right weather, the absence of a line – induces him to make a spontaneous visit to Santa Maria del Carmine, or San Marco, or the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi …

What he forgets, of course, is that works of art are not immortal. Nor are they immune to catastrophes, both human and natural. In 1993, a bomb ripped through part of the Uffizi. The April before, in Florence to look for an apartment, we had stayed at the Pensione Quisisana and Ponte Vecchio, where parts of
A Room with a View
were filmed. This was a very old-fashioned pension, located on the upper floors of a
palazzo
that gives on to the Arno, a few doors down from the Uffizi. There was a dilapidated, if somewhat grand, entrance hall in which an old woman, presumably the mother or grandmother of the owner, could usually be seen, paying little attention to the television, which was always on. To reach our room, we had to traverse several short staircases (going both up and down), three corridors of varying width, and a
salone
with a white floor and a piano; as Forster noted in his 1958 afterword to
A Room with a View,
after the war the houses
along that part of the Lungarno were ‘renumbered and remodelled and, as it were, re-melted’, some of the façades extended and others shrunk so that it became ‘impossible to decide which room was romantic half a century ago’. I remember that we went to a recital in the church of Santo Stefano by the Russian pianist Bella Davidovich, and then ran into her the next morning at breakfast; she too was staying at the Quisisana and Ponte Vecchio, and when we congratulated her, she removed the glove from her right hand to shake ours: a reminder that until not very long ago, most women wore gloves.

Anyway, it rained a lot on that visit. (Pino Oriolo, among others, joked about the fact that the famously glorious Tuscan spring is often no more than a succession of drenched afternoons.) We found an apartment, then flew home, with the intention of returning at the beginning of July. On the evening of 27 May, back in the States, I turned on the television news and learned that a car bomb had exploded outside the Uffizi, destroying three paintings, damaging thirty other works, and causing grave injury to the museum and to many of the buildings
around it, including the one that housed the Quisisana and Ponte Vecchio. The pensione was closed, and has never reopened.

During the first months we lived in Florence – the late summer and fall of 1993 – we would often walk to the end of the Chiasso dei Baroncelli in order to observe, through a gnarled barrier of scaffolding affixed with red and white tape, the piles of rubble, metal and plastic that were the bomb’s legacy. Down streets like these Lucy Honeychurch had gotten lost with Miss Lavish; now they were gutted quarries, reminiscent of those through which Michelangelo wandered. The devastation was so intense as to bring to mind photographs of the Lungarno and the Via Por Santa Maria after they were bombed by the Germans in the summer of 1945 – and yet on that occasion, at least, no great art had been destroyed. Starting in 1940, the Fascist government, with alarming foresight, had begun taking protective measures in the event that war should break out, padding some statues and removing others, along with the bronze baptistry doors, to a concrete shelter in the Boboli Gardens. At the Accademia, the Michelangelos
were enclosed within brick silos. Many of the city’s paintings were taken out of Florence altogether, to be housed at some of the grander villas in the countryside, among them Montagnana, Poppiano and the Castello Montegufoni, which was owned by Osbert Sitwell’s father, Sir George Sitwell. In
Laughter in the Next Room,
the fourth volume of his memoir
Left Hand, Right Hand!
, Sitwell explains that Montegufoni was chosen

because it is situated in a remote district, but, still more, because the doors and windows of the chief rooms were big enough to allow the largest pictures to be carried in and out without risk of damage … here, very near what was to become for some days one of the most fiercely contested portions of the front line, was gathered together the rarest of all house – parties … among the very first arrivals, on the 18th of November [1942], were Uccello’s
Battle of San Romano
, the Cimabue
Virgin Enthroned
, the great
Madonna
of Giotto, and Botticelli’s
Primavera
.

For the grand sum of seventeen lire a day, Guido Masti, Sir George Sitwell’s retainer, was
given the task of protecting works of art valued at the time at three hundred and twenty million dollars. Yet he was far from alone in the castle. In 1943 Cesare Fasola, then curator of the Uffizi, reputedly walked across the battle lines to Montegufoni, where he took up a protective stance among the paintings he loved. More surrealistically, as many as two thousand refugees ‘swarmed into the cellars and dungeons from towns as far away as Empoli and Castel Fiorentino: for the old reputation of Montegufoni as a stronghold had revived in the popular mind’.

There were, then, for some ten or fourteen days, these two populations: the huddled crowds of homeless and terrified souls in the darkness below, where, at any rate, it was comparatively safe, and on the ground floor above, in grave danger, hundreds of world-famous pictures, piled against the sides of the walls, in the lofty painted rooms and halls… . Next, the Germans arrived, occupied the Castello, and turned out the refugees. They lived in the rooms above, and often threatened to destroy the pictures, but Professor Fasola and Guido Masti continued somehow to preserve them. When the German General, on entering the Castle, uttered menacing words about these great canvases being in his way and that they should be burnt, Guido said to him, as only an Italian, with the natural imaginative rhetoric of his race, could say:

‘These pictures belong not to one nation, but are the possession of the world.’

Remarkably, almost none of the works housed at Montegufoni were damaged; an exception was a circular Ghirlandaio that the Germans had used as a tabletop, and that was consequently stained with wine, food and coffee, and scarred by knives.

In his memoir
The Art of Adventure,
Eric Linklater later recalled arriving at Montegufoni with the BBC war correspondent Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, not long after the Germans had fled. ‘Some refugees had been sleeping in the castello,’ he wrote; ‘… cheerfully perceiving our excitement, they were making sounds of lively approval, and a couple of men began noisily to open the shutters … Vaughan-Thomas shouted, “Uccello!”’

I, in the same instant, cried, ‘Giotto!’ For a moment we stood there, quite still, held in the double grip of amazement and delight … We went nearer, and the refugees came round us and proudly exclaimed, ‘
E vero, é vero! Uccello! Giotto! Molto bello, molto antico
!’ … Then I heard a sudden clamour of voices, a yell of shrill delight, and Vaughan-Thomas shouting ‘Botticelli!’ as if he were a fox-hunter view-hallooing on a hill. I ran to see what they had found, and came to a halt before the
Primavera.

For foreigners living in Italy, the years leading up to the war had been difficult ones to endure. As a consequence of Mussolini’s rise to power and the invasion of Abyssinia, an unsuspected strain of intolerance mingled with nationalism had begun to reveal itself in the Italians, of whom the novelist Sybille Bedford – a teenager in Italy at the time – made this acute observation:

When their rules are too bad, they duck; retreat into personal relations, family relations – there you’ll find riches of good behaviour, devotion
and
honour as well as endurance and courage. Out in politics they are opportunists and showoffs, clever when they ought to be straightforward, rhetorical when they ought to go home and think, and they haven’t learned how to compromise without treachery.

There was certainly little compromise under Mussolini. Among other draconian reforms introduced by
Il Duce,
foreign words were expunged from the national vocabulary. ‘
Autista
replaced chauffeur,’ Acton remembered, ‘
albergo
hotel, and half the hotels in Italy had to be re-baptized in Fascist style, all the Eden Parks and Eden Palaces … besides the countless Albions, Bristols, and Britannias …’ An Italian ‘His Master’s Voice’ (‘La Voice del Padrone’) catalogue from the period advertises recordings by ‘Wladimiro Horowitz’ and ‘Sergio Rachmaninoff’, as well as compositions by ‘Luigi Beethoven’, ‘Wolfango Mozart’ and ‘Francesco Schubert’. Predictably, such xenophobia found its easiest target in Florence, with its ‘English Tea Rooms’ and ‘Old England’ shops. Now the walls of buildings were ‘scrawled all over with slogans which were meant to remind us that “
La Guerra è bella
”
(War is beautiful),’ while the artificial inflation of the
lira
halved the incomes of old Englishwomen already living hand-to–mouth. Earlier, Acton had been impressed by the ‘super lounge-lizards’ cruising Via Tornabuoni, ‘all their goods in the shop window, [spilling] on to the pavement to inspect each passing ankle and compare notes in voices loud enough to be overheard’. Now these ‘unemployed Narcissi’ were taking as avidly to the Blackshirt uniform as they had previously to buttonholes, brilliantine and spats. Foreigners previously cultivated were
persone non grate.
Even Acton’s mother, Hortense, was taken into custody one afternoon, under the pretense that there was a problem with her passport. For three days and nights the elderly Mrs Acton, ‘in a flimsy summer dress without even a toothbrush’, was ‘immured among prostitutes and others of ill-repute …’