佛罗伦萨, 意大利Florence, Italy

Xu Zhimo rendered Firenze in Chinese as “翡冷翠,” roughly “cold jade.” The name is so famous that before I came, I had always associated Florence with cold and with the green of jade. We arrived in the evening and checked into a hotel in the old town. I opened the window to find the neighbors’ shutters and a tree full of green. At first glance, the name almost fit. Two strange portraits hung in the room, each sitter’s eyes completely covered by a cloud. I did not give them much thought. Designer hotel.

The next morning we stepped outside and realized we had been tricked. A heat wave across Europe had turned the days into high summer, and there was nothing cold about 翡冷翠. In retrospect, perhaps those clouds in the hotel room were there to bring rain. Even after sunset, the city showed no sign of calling it a night. It stayed lively until eleven.

The Dome#

To see Florence, you start with the stairs. The climb up Giotto’s Bell Tower wound through more than four hundred steps. The staircase narrowed, the windows shrank, and just when I was panting hard enough to question my choices, light broke through a wire-mesh window: the red dome of Florence Cathedral was right there, startlingly close. Across the city, most buildings famous enough to have names seemed to connect somehow to the Medici. The cathedral directly in front of us was the exception. Construction began before the family came to power.

Back down from the bell tower, then straight into the line for the dome. The route up passed between the dome’s inner and outer shells and right past The Last Judgment, begun by Vasari and finished by Zuccari. From the cathedral floor, the fresco is only a blurred ring of color. Up on the walkway, the angels and demons have faces.

Farther up, the stairs finally ended and the sky opened all at once. Florence spread out below us again: red roofs, hills, the river, Palazzo Vecchio, Ponte Vecchio, the Uffizi. I checked the day’s itinerary. Sure enough, more than half of it was going to be spent touring the Medici’s offices and living rooms.

Back on the ground, Palazzo Vecchio was next door, once home to the Medici. Frescoes climbed the courtyard walls and carried on across the vaulted ceilings. The rooms upstairs were dark, every window bright as a painting. One Gothic window faced the dome dead on, fitting it perfectly into the frame. The picture had been hanging there unchanged for five hundred years.

David#

From Palazzo Vecchio we walked to the Accademia. David was the biggest name on the list, so we put him first. Michelangelo’s unfinished Prisoners lined both sides of the corridor, figures still struggling out of the stone. At the far end, under the skylight, stood David. I had seen him in photographs a hundred times, but standing at his feet still stopped me: much taller than I had imagined, and much younger. His placard said he was originally meant for the roof of Florence Cathedral. Instead, he stood outside Palazzo Vecchio for more than three hundred years.

The Uffizi#

From the Accademia, we went on to the Uffizi. The building was once the Medici’s offices; now it is a museum. The masterpieces are packed as tightly as the visitors.

The corridors are worth taking slowly. Their windows are more generous than the galleries: one squeezes the tower of Palazzo Vecchio and the dome into the same frame; another opens onto an entire hillside across the river.

At the end we left the museum through the Vasari Corridor, the elevated passage once reserved for the Medici family. Its windows overlook Ponte Vecchio. Below them, the goldsmiths’ signs baked in the sun, and the shops were still selling what they had sold centuries ago. A few feet below the family’s private passage, Florentines came and went across the bridge.

The Florentines#

Once we were out of the museum and down by the river, the Florentines took over. The wind died. The Arno went flat as glass, and the bridges and houses dropped whole into it. Someone rowed a small boat through the middle and quietly broke the reflection in two.

The sun looked close to setting, but it still had a while to go. We followed the crowd up toward Piazzale Michelangelo. Halfway there, I looked back and saw the dome and the bell tower through a gap in the leaves.

From the edge of the square, the bridges across the Arno lined up one after another toward the edge of the city. The steps and railings were packed with tourists and locals waiting for sunset.

Just as the sun touched the ridge, someone got down on one knee. A woman nodded through tears, balloons rose, and the whole square cheered. The cheering carried on as the light along the horizon faded.

On the way down, the path cut through the rose garden. The grass was still full of people. Tourists and locals stayed put. The sun was down, but the afterglow still had a long way to go.

Morning and Afterglow#

The morning we left, I got up early. At that hour Florence still belonged to the locals: the light lay low across the flagstones, and a mother cycled past with her child on the way to school. Just another day.

Before leaving, I climbed to the terrace for one last look at the dome. When work began six hundred years ago, no one knew how it would be built. By now, everyone is used to it. The Medici ruled the city for three centuries. Their rule ended almost three centuries ago. Florentines are used to a sunset that leaves a long afterglow. They are used to the Medici’s afterglow too. Everything the family left behind is still here, and people still go about their lives in that light.