A Hobbling Tour of Florence and Rome
Observations of an Unapologetic Tourist
Part Two
We arrived at Florence’s Santa Maria Novella station and got a quick ride to our hotel with a sharp young cabbie who was surprised to find two obvious Americans who sure didn’t look as if their grandparents came from Italy, speaking decent Italian, and persisting in it even after he went on in English. His initial reluctance to speak Italian with us was a pattern we encountered frequently in Florence, but never accompanied by the flat rudeness of that long-ago Parisian cop. And the reluctance doesn’t exist in Rome. I imagined a Florentine explanation: we are all professional tourist-workers of one kind or another: we have to smile and nod and sell you our city’s faded glories, but don’t mess with our language except to ask for the bill, because we want to be able to say nasty things about you when we’re talking among ourselves. In any case, we had to pass an informal fluency test to get most Florentines to relax into la bella lingua. Once they understood that we understood almost all of what they were saying to one another, the fun went out of calling us porci, or stronzi (which means “assholes”), and they were even a bit tickled that we had caught them out.
Signor Angelo was an exception to the reluctance-rule, and he was waiting for us at the Albergo Beacci Tornabuoni when we dragged in half dead. The hotel is a lovely converted 17th century palazzo in the heart of the old city, decorated and appointed in a manner a pampered 19th century English or American traveler on the Grand Tour would have recognized, with quite good prints on the walls, handsome carpets on the parquet floors, wood paneling, urns bearing fresh flowers, and the odd 18th century nude female statue (or decent copy thereof) coyly smiling from an alcove or two. Signor Angelo, round and robust, dignified in his dark suit, but affable, was delighted that we spoke Italian. He commiserated with us about our travel-trials – “ Beh, Alitalia, che cosa si può fare?” – but his use of the phrase didn’t mean fuck you. And he showed us to our ample room on the 5th floor (grazie addio, there was an elevator).
Not a trace of the efficient, impersonal, soul-annihilating international hotel style: Paris Hilton’s grave-spinning ancestor might never have existed. It was a big square room with an enormous bed complete with a bolster, a free-standing wardrobe, a tiny writing desk, and a window which looked out over acres of terracotta tiled roofs to the Duomo itself. The bathroom was beautifully tiled – Italians may not have invented glazed indoor tiling, but they perfected it – with a shower-bath and a bidet next to the toilet, and another window we could open for cross-ventilation.
Anent the bidet: Patsy and I both knew what it was for, but we seem to be rarities among contemporary American tourists in Europe. Patsy’s account of the necessary invention of the bidet makes sense: it saves water. Europeans have always been careful with their water, reserving most of it, since antiquity, for crops, and for drinking and cooking. Bathing was done, from classical times clear through the middle-ages and into the early modern era, in communal bath-houses. And although the Romans elevated the act of excretion to a civic ceremony by building crap-houses whose architecture was as grand as the baths they adjoined, where the élite sat on carved marble thrones and did business as they did their business, toilets in private homes didn’t exist until the 16th century, and then only for the very rich. Keeping clean, especially when it came to the private parts, was always a problem for the middle class and especially the poor, in a society where water was precious. Even after most private houses in the great European cities had indoor plumbing, full baths were a once-a-week occasion, if that, and flush toilets, which consume extravagant amounts of water, were rare. Americans, who have until recently enjoyed a seemingly inexhaustible supply of water, were accustomed to daily baths and showers, and think nothing of using four gallons of water to disappear the poop and piss every time they sit on their porcelain thrones. But the Europeans remained frugal with water even after the introduction of the flush toilet, the piped bathtub and the shower. Water’s too precious to waste.
So full bathing, or showering, remained a luxury, to be indulged in sparingly. Most days one made do with soaping the face and armpits over the sink and using cologne for the rest. And the bidet, itself a sink with a plug, uses far less water than a flush toilet. There is also the issue of toilet paper, which has always been expensive in Europe. Instead of using massive amounts of it cleaning yourself up and flushing the mess down the toilet, it’s cheaper and more hygienic to do a minimal cleaning with TP on the pot and finish up by sitting on the bidet, filling it with a little water, and washing yourself. And for women, especially, the bidet is a splendid invention, for obvious reasons, not only those involving menstruation. I thought I was truly in Paris (or at least Henry Miller’s version of it), many years ago, when a whore with whom I had just done business proceeded from the bed into the little bathroom, naked and still chatting with me in French about my jouale Canadian accent (she was kinder than the flic had been, but of course I was a client), squatted on the bidet, and sluiced out of herself every residue of our encounter which the condom hadn’t caught.
But there’s still a myth among water-rich, squeaky-clean Americans that Europeans – particularly the French and the Italians – smell bad because they don’t bathe every day. In fact, because of the bidet, their private parts are cleaner and less subject to infection, and I wonder all these years later if the Parisian poule took such pains to wash my equipment before we fulfilled the terms of the transaction, not just to stimulate me so I’d get done quicker, or in the vain hope of killing STD germs, but simply because, to her, I stank.
Perhaps another reason, besides our indifference to soccer, that Americans have never really understood Europeans is that most of us don’t understand the function of the bidet. It’s become an ugly cliché in Europe that American tourists regularly crap in it and wonder why it doesn’t flush. As the Euro continues to rise against the dollar, perhaps one should be installed in the Presidential suite’s bathrooms in the White House, with instructions and a brief history, preferably illustrated.
There were a few modern touches in our room. The wooden wardrobe, beautifully painted with leafy curlicues and grotteschi which echoed the decorations along the tops of the walls, hid a code-activated safe so we didn’t have to worry about leaving our extra money and passports at the front desk. And there was a tiny fridge full of micro-bottles of booze and other goodies we knew better than to sample, because they would assume gigantic proportions on our final bill. The fridge supported a TV which, as it turned out, picked up only three channels, two of which were fuzzy. We were a little disappointed by the TV, because we’d hoped to watch the US play Italy. Patsy remembered only after we had returned home that she’d noticed a complicated plug and a remote on the floor near the tv on our last morning at the hotel, which probably connected to a jillion-channel satellite feed. But it was just as well: plugging in would have added to our bill, no doubt, and in any case that first evening we knew we’d learn the outcome of the match eventually.
Il Albergo Beacci Tornabuoni is famous for its terrace restaurant, and justly so. Florence is full of restaurants, of course, but they are all relentlessly expensive and for the most part they serve generic Italian food catering to tourist tastes, either imitations of southern Italian or even Italo-American cooking (spaghetti and red gravy), or badly-cooked insults to traditional Tuscan cuisine. There are, to be sure, wonderful restaurants in the small towns outside the city, but we had limited time. So on Signor Angelo’s advice we took our first supper on the terrazzo, and it was magical.
Signor Angelo had been the manager of the hotel for many years, but the Beacci had recently changed hands. The new owners knew he was vital to the daily workings and general ambience of the place, and he’d agreed to stay on, even though he was getting a bit long in the tooth and thinking about retiring, to make sure, as he said, that that Beacci wouldn’t turn into a Hilton or a Hyatt. He served also as headwaiter and sommelier at dinner, determined to maintain every detail of the hotel’s old-fashioned tradition of hospitality as long as he had the energy.
He seated us next to the low wall of the terrazzo, where we had a glorious view of the centrocittà, brought us menus, and told us that although the hotel’s dishes were limited in variety, he could vouch for the fact that they were “toscano vero.” He went on to explain – in Italian – that he’d been born and raised in a small paese outside the city, and he took Tuscan food seriously. It might have been part of his professional hype, but it didn’t matter: the food was every bit as good as he promised, and we wound up taking all but the last of our Florentine suppers on the terrace, because it is certainly the most beautiful place to eat in Florence unless you have a Florentine friend who invites you to her own terrazzo overlooking the city. And as the view demonstrated, Florence is a city of terrazzi, almost every building sporting wide balconies on its upper floors, shaded partially by overhanging eaves or café umbrellas, many graced by full rooftop gardens. It’s a style of hot weather urban outdoor living which goes back to the ancient Romans, and it still makes sense. Air conditioning is proliferating, of course, but electricity costs un occhio della testa (“an eye from your head”), and until the 2004 heat wave, which killed almost as many poor, elderly Italians as it did their French counterparts, the Italians trusted their terrazzi and their umbrella-shaded outdoor trattorie to keep them comfortable during the hot months. But the 2004 disaster was only the worst of a succession of increasingly hot summers across the Mediterranean basin, and this summer [2006], if our early experience of it is an indicator, promises to be worse. Whether the 4,000-year-old Mediterranean method of beating the heat by building thick-walled houses around open atria, using cross-ventilation, and taking to the terraces and the roofs for eating, socializing and even sleeping during the Dog Days, will be adequate to global warming is anybody’s guess. But air conditioning isn’t even a short-term answer, for many obvious reasons, although at the old Beacci Tornabuoni, the wheezing machine in the corner of our room was still such a welcome novelty to the maids who came in to clean when we weren’t there that they turned it on and left it on and must have been baffled, perhaps even offended, when upon our return we turned it off and opened the windows they had shut.
Well, I confess I had another reason for opening the windows. My poor non-smoking wife had booked that particular room because it was a no-smoking one, something she generally does when we travel together. Of course she has my health, and her own, foremost in her mind. But she’s also averse to air conditioning unless conditions are truly vile, and I agree with her. And I quickly realized that I could sneak smokes without activating the smoke-detector in the ceiling or afflicting Patsy with my vile exhalations of cancer-fog, by leaning out the bedroom window and staring, rapt, across the tiled roofs, to the Duomo and its imitators, all the way to the dip amid the houses marking the line of the Arno, and beyond to the line of hills which formed the humped horizon. The sneaky smoking took me back to my time at boarding school, where I’d first become addicted to cigarettes. Smoking for everyone but seniors was expressly forbidden, and even for the lordly seniors there was no smoking in the dorm rooms. So I smoked out the window, feeling deliciously criminal. And at the Beacci I faced the same problem of disposing of my butts. At school I’d flushed them down the toilet, but here I didn’t want to waste the water. So I extinguished them carefully on the tiles sloping down from the window, and tossed them into the street five flights below. Littering, sure, but better than wasting water.
From the terrace restaurant that first evening (smoking permitted and a portacenere provided) we were enchanted to see clouds of what we took to be bats darting and wheeling through the sky over the chimneys and roof-tiles (and tv antennas and satellite dishes, the only aspect of the skyscape which Michelangelo wouldn’t have recognized, though the visionary Leonardo might have). “Pipistrelli?” we asked Angelo. He laughed. “Niente affato! Sono rondini. È l’ora dei rondini.” Once he’d identified the swallows we recognized them (bats don’t have tails, duh), hundreds of them gracefully scouring the sky free of bugs. Of course they are the birds which appear as curved Vs in the background skies of Renaissance paintings. There are bats, Angelo went on, but they come out later, when it’s almost too dark to see them. “Ma Firenze era sempre la città dei rondini.” Take that, Capistrano!
Swallows – I think the British call this variety chimney swifts – are messy nesters who like holes, and later that night as I leaned out the window with my cigarette thinking about the swallows and looking at the way the roof-tiles were laid, I figured something out. The terracotta half-cylinder tiles are hefty, about two feet long and maybe four pounds apiece, and they run in lines from top to bottom of the roof slope, covering the spaces between the flat slabs which form the roof itself. They overlap one another, interlocking, so there’s no reason to cement them in except at the top and bottom of each row. But as I looked at the bottom rows of tiles on a building across the street I noticed that each tile’s arch was also plugged with cement. Anti-swallow measures, doubtless invented by the Romans, who also invented both cement and concrete. Of course the swallows find other places in which to nest, but the terrace-dwelling Romans solved the problem of bird-shit dropping from the roof into their wine-cups a couple of millennia ago, and so it goes in Italy today. Don’t fix it if it ain’t busted.
The other guests of the hotel seemed to be members of a large extended family of Americans, Deep South by their accents, who had taken over the small indoor bar. The men were all large, florid, and sunburned; the women equally fleshy but less rosy; the younger children noisy and complaining; the few teenagers unsurprisingly sullen and bored. None of them took their dinner on the terrazzo, preferring the hotel’s dining room, where the tables were bigger, so they could all sit together. The dining-room is high-ceilinged and handsomely-proportioned, but I was interested that a group of American southerners, who regard out-door cooking and eating as a religion – the First Church of Jesus Christ Barbecued – ignored the lovely terrace, which is mentioned in all the guidebooks. But from fragments of the conversation which drifted onto the terrace, I gleaned that most of the senior members of the family were on their third or even fourth trip to Florence, and they’d picked the Beacci Tornabuoni because it wasn’t “a typical tourist hotel.” Well, of course it is, and a very charming one, perhaps not the most expensive in the city, but pricey enough, largely because of the terrace restaurant. Over my post-prandial glass of Sambucca (con mosche, with flies, as the three coffee beans in the glass are called) I wondered about my countrymen bragging about having discovered a place that wasn’t a Sheraton, but seeming to scorn its most attractive aspect as “touristy.” But every damn guest at the Beacci was a tourist! And what’s wrong with admitting it? There was some form of daffy denial going on with those folks, at least among the elders who did most of the talking. You spend a lot of money to bring your large family somewhere to see the sights, and then you try to pretend that you’re not really just there to see the sights. So why did you come?
As mentioned, the tables on the terrace weren’t big enough for them all to sit together, and I was rather glad. None of them, despite their frequent visits to Florence and other parts of Italy, spoke any Italian, and Patsy and I were trying hard to use our years of lessons, avoiding our own language whenever possible, in a rather forlorn attempt, given the brevity of our trip, at total immersion. After all, the Alitalia lovely had already given me a lesson in the congiuntivo.
The southerners were affable and friendly, but when a few of the elders came out to the terrace for an after-dinner drink, they were baffled by an enormous roar which rose up from the streets. Patsy and I had already been asking Angelo and our young waiter for updates on the US-Italy match. The waiter told me, in Italian, that Italy had scored. I passed on what I had learned. “Oh, yeah,” said one of the southern women. She nudged her husband. “They’re playin’ that big soccer tournament right now. The World Series of soccer.” The genial man rose. “America versus Italy? Honey, where’s Danny?” He turned to us. “Our son is crazy about soccer, though I don’t know why – he’s good at real football. But he loves this stuff – he’s gotta hear about this!” The father left, but I suspected that Danny, probably one of the terminally-bored teenagers, was already out watching the match in a bar and getting hammered with some brand-new Italian friends. And his father and mother were both gone from the terrace when a second roar, not quite as loud, but equally enthusiastic, came up from a slightly different area of the city. The young waiter, looking gloomy, said the US team had tied the score, against all expectations after their dismal showing in the first round. We hadn’t realized just how many Americans were in the city. We would learn.
The newspapers next morning reported that the match had been very ugly by World Cup standards: three red cards had been handed out by the referees for egregious fouls, the first to an Italian who elbowed an American in the face, the others to two American players seeking revenge by trying ankle-breaking tackles. The American coach sounded like Rumsfeld praising the troops in Iraq for using whatever means necessary to punish their evil enemies. But the newspaper also pointed out that the ongoing scandal involving the match-rigging of Italy’s four most powerful clubs during the regular season, might wind up in the demotion of the clubs to second-tier play, even if the national team won the World Cup. The head of the Italian Football League had already been indicted, and we’d learn that he’d be heavily fined and banned from any involvement with calcio for life.
As an American baseball fan troubled by Barry Bonds breaking Hank Aaron’s homer record with the asterisk of steroids, I sympathized with the plight of Italian calcio fans facing a betrayal of “the beautiful game” of such magnitude. But on the other hand, in Italy regulations in general (and there are a wearisome number of them, given an entrenched, thoroughly corrupt bureaucracy extending back more than two thousand years, built into ancient Roman law by the lawyers and politicians who framed it) are considered challenges to ingenuity rather than rules to be taken literally. Every enacted law represents nothing but a victory for one party over the rest in the game of partisan politics, and is held in contempt by the losers and the general population. The wrangles of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, and the further schism between the White and Black Guelphs, which resulted in Dante’s exile from Florence, and disgusted Machiavelli himself so much that he abandoned his native city, have never ended. And in Italy, calcio is a branch of politics as usual.