Neither Here Nor There (23 page)

‘You guys been to the bar?’ A small uncomprehending bow. I was rather beginning to enjoy this one-way conversation. ‘You look like you’ve had a few, if you don’t mind me saying so. Hope nobody’s going to be sick!’ I added jauntily.

The elevator crept on and eventually thudded to a halt. ‘Well, here we are, gentlemen, eighth floor. Alight here for all stations to Iwo Jima.’

They turned to me in the hallway and said simultaneously, ‘Buon giorno.’

‘And a very buon giorno to you,’ I riposted, jabbing button number one anxiously.

I got to the bar two minutes before it shut, though in fact it was effectively shut already. An over-zealous waiter had gathered up all the little dishes of nuts and the pianist was nowhere to be seen. It didn’t really matter because they didn’t serve snacks there anyway. I returned to my room, rummaged in the mini-bar and found two tiny foil bags containing about fourteen peanuts each. I searched again, but this was the only food among the many bottles of soft drinks and intoxicants. As I stood eating the peanuts one at a time, to make the pleasure last, I idly looked at the mini-bar tariff card and discovered that this pathetic little snack was costing me $4.80. Or at least it would have if I’d been foolish enough to tell anyone about it.

In the morning I transferred to the Hotel Corallo on the Via Nazionale. The room had no TV, but there was a free showercap and it was 50,000 lire a day cheaper. I have never seen a smaller bathroom. It was so small that there was no stall for the shower. You just shut the door to the bedroom and let the shower spray all over everything – over the toilet, over the sink, over yesterday’s copy of the
Guardian,
over your fresh change of underwear.

I went first to the cathedral, the centrepiece of the town. I defy anyone to turn the corner into the Piazza del Duomo and not have his little heart leap. It is one of Europe’s great sights.

But it was packed with tourists and with people trying to sell them things. When I was there in 1972, Florence was crowded, but it was August and you expected it. But this was a weekday in April, in the middle of the working year, and it was far worse. I walked down to the Uffizi Palace and around the Piazza della Signoria and the other fixtures of the old part of town and it was the same everywhere – throngs of people, almost all of them from abroad, shuffling about in that aimless, exasperating way of visitors, in groups of five and six, always looking at something about twenty feet above ground level. What is it they see up there?

In my adolescent years whenever I was in crowded places I often pretended I had a ray gun with me, which I could use to vaporize anyone I didn’t like the look of – dawdlers, couples in matching outfits, children called Junior and Chip. I always imagined myself striding through the crowd, firing the gun at selected targets and shouting, ‘Make way, please! Culling!’ I felt a little like that now.

There were hundreds of Japanese – not just the traditional busloads of middle-aged camera-toters but also students and young couples and backpackers. They were at least as numerous as the Americans, and the Americans were everywhere, plus hordes of Germans and Australians and Scandinavians, and Dutch and British and on and on. You wonder how many people one city can absorb.

Here’s an interesting statistic for you: in 1951, the year I was born, there were seven million international airline passengers in the world. Nowadays that many people fly to Hawaii every year. The more popular tourist places of Europe routinely receive numbers of visitors that dwarf their own populations. In Florence, the annual ratio of tourists to locals is 14:1. How can any place preserve any kind of independent life when it is so manifestly overwhelmed? It can’t. It’s as simple as that.

It is of course hypocritical to rail against tourists when you are one yourself, but none the less you can’t escape the fact that mass tourism is ruining the very things it wants to celebrate. And it can only get worse as the Japanese and other rich Asians become bolder travellers. When you add in the tens of millions of eastern Europeans who are free at last to go where they want, we could be looking back on the last thirty years as a golden age of travel, God help us all.

Nowhere is the decline in quality in Florence more vivid than on the Ponte Vecchio, the shop-lined bridge across the Arno. Twenty years ago the Ponte Vecchio was home to silversmiths and artisan jewellers and it was quiet enough, even in August, to take a picture of a friend (or in my case a picture of Stephen Katz) sitting on the bridge rail. Now it’s like the stowage deck of the
Lusitania
just after somebody’s said, ‘Say, is that a torpedo?’ It was covered with Senegalese immigrants selling semi-crappy items of jewellery and replica Louis Vuitton luggage spread out on blankets or pieces of black velvet. And the crowds of tourists pushing among them were unbelievable. It took me half an hour to bull my way through, and I didn’t try again for the rest of the week. Far easier, I concluded, to make a quarter-mile detour to the Ponte di Santa Trinita, the next bridge down-river, and cross from there.

The city fathers of Florence could do a great deal more to ease the pressures – like allow museums to be open for more than a couple of hours a day, so that everybody doesn’t have to go at once. I went to the Uffizi now and had to stand in line for forty minutes and then had to shuffle around amid crowds of people straining to see the paintings. Several rooms were roped off and darkened. Again, surely, they could spread the crowds around by opening more rooms and showing more paintings. In 1900 the Uffizi had 2,395 paintings on display. Today it shows just 500. The others are locked away, almost never seen.

Still, few galleries are more worth the frustration. The Uffizi must have more perfect paintings than any other gallery on the planet – not just Tintorettos and Botticellis, but the most sumptuous and arresting works by people quite unknown to me, like Gentile da Fabriano and Simone Martini. It struck me as odd that the former pair could be so much more famous than the latter. Then again, a hundred years from now it could easily be the other way around. Old masters come and go. Did you know, for instance, that Piero della Francesca was all but unknown a century ago? It seems to me impossible to look at his portraits of the Duke of Urbino and not see them instantly as masterpieces, but Ruskin in all his writings mentioned him only once in passing, and Walter Pater mentioned him not at all, and the bible of the nineteenth-century art world, Heinrich Wolfflin’s
Classic Art,
appears to be unaware of his existence. It wasn’t until 1951, with a study by Kenneth Clark, that people really began to appreciate him again. The same was true of Caravaggio and Botticelli, whose works spent much of two centuries tucked away in attics, quite unloved. Caravaggio’s ‘Bacchus’ was found in an Uffizi store-room in 1916.

I spent four days wandering around Florence, trying to love it, but mostly failing. The famous view of the rooftops from the Boboli Gardens – the one that graces a thousand postcards – was splendid and entrancing, and I liked the long walks along the Arno, but mostly it was disappointing. Even when I made allowance for the hordes of tourists, I couldn’t help feeling that much of it was tawdrier than any city this beautiful and historic and lavishly subsidized by visitors like me had any right to be. There was litter everywhere and gypsy beggars constantly importuning and Senegalese street vendors cluttering every sidewalk with their sunglasses and Louis Vuitton luggage, and cars parked half on the narrow pavements so that you constantly had to step in the road to get past them. You don’t so much walk around Florence as pick your way among the obstacles. Everything seemed dusty and in need of a wash. The trattorias were crowded and dear and often unfriendly, especially in the city centre. Nobody seemed to love the city. Even rich people dropped litter without qualm. The buildings around the Duomo seemed to grow progressively dustier and shabbier each time I walked past them.

Why is it that the cities people most want to see are the ones that so often do the least to make it agreeable to do so? Why can’t the Florentines see that it would be in their own interest to sweep up the litter and put out some benches and force the gypsies to stop being so persistent in their panhandling and spend more on brightening the place up? Florence has more treasures than any city in the world – twenty-one palaces, fifty-five historic churches, eight galleries, twenty museums – more than the whole of Spain, according to a UNESCO report, and yet the annual restoration budget for the entire city is less than £5 million. (The Archaeological Museum alone has 10,000 pieces still awaiting cleaning from the great flood of 1966.) It’s no wonder so much of it looks unloved.

Where neglect doesn’t come into play, incompetence and corruption often do. In 1986, the long-overdue decision was taken to restore the cobbles of the Piazza della Signoria. The ancient stones were dug up and taken away for cleaning. When they were returned they looked brand new. They were brand new. The originals, or so it was alleged, had been taken away and sold for a fortune and could now be found as driveways to rich people’s houses.

It was the gypsies who got to me the most. They sit along almost every street calling out to passers-by, with heart-breakingly filthy children of three and four stuck on their laps, made to sit there for hour after hour just to heighten the pathos. It’s inhuman, as scandalous as forcing the children to work in a sweatshop, and yet the carabinieri, who strut through the streets in groups of three and four looking smart and lethal in their uniforms, pay them not the slightest notice.

The only gypsy I didn’t mind, curiously enough, was the little girl who picked my pockets as I was leaving the city. The kid was magic. It was a Sunday morning, brilliantly sunny. I had just checked out of the hotel and was heading for the station to catch a train to Milan. As I reached the street opposite, three children carrying wrinkled day-old newspapers approached trying to sell them to me. I waved them away. One of them, a jabbering and unwashed girl of about eight, was unusually persistent and pressed the paper on me to such an extent that I stopped and warned her off with a firm voice and a finger in her face and she slunk off abashed. I walked on, with the cocksure strut of a guy who knows how to handle himself on the street, and ten feet later knew without even feeling my pockets that something was missing. I looked down and the inside breast pocket of my jacket was unzipped and gaping emptily. The kid had managed in the time it had taken me to give her a five-second lecture on street etiquette to reach into my jacket, unzip the pocket, dip a hand inside, withdraw two folders of traveller’s cheques and pocket them. I wasn’t angry. I was impressed. I couldn’t have been more impressed if I’d found myself standing in my underwear. I took inventory of my rucksack and other pockets, but nothing else had been disturbed. It hardly needed to be. The girl, who of course was now nowhere to be seen – she was probably at that moment sitting down to a feast of truffles and Armagnac with her seventy-four nearest relatives at a campground somewhere in the hills – had got $1,500 worth of traveller’s cheques, not bad for five seconds’ work.

I went to the police office at the railway station, but the policeman there, sitting with his feet evidently nailed to the desk, did not want his Sunday morning disturbed and indicated that I should go to the Questura, the central police office. It never entered his mind to go out and try to find the little culprits. Only with reluctance did he write down the address on a scrap of paper I provided for him.

Outside I climbed into a cab and told the driver where to take me. ‘Peekpockets?’ he said, looking at me in the rear-view mirror as we whizzed through the streets. This Questura run was obviously part of his Sunday-morning routine.

‘Yes,’ I said, a bit sheepishly.

‘Geepsies,’ he added with disgust and made a spitting sound, and that was the end of our conversation.

I presented myself at the guard-room of the Questura and was directed upstairs to a waiting-room, a bare cell with grey, flaking walls and a high ceiling. There were three others ahead of me. Occasionally, a policeman or police-woman would come and summon one of them. I waited an hour. Others came and were seen ahead of me. Eventually I presented myself at one of the cubicles around the corner and was told curtly to return to the waiting-room.

I had with me
Fodor’s Guide to Italy
which contained an appendix of Italian-English phrases and I looked through it now to see if it offered anything applicable to encounters with sticky-fingered gypsy children. But it was just full of the usual guidebook type of sentences, like ‘Where can I buy silk stockings, a map of the city, films?’ (my shopping list exactly!) and ‘I want: razor blades, a hair-cut, a shave, a shampoo, to send a telegram to England (America)’. The utter uselessness of the language appendices in guidebooks never fails to fascinate me. Take this sentence from Fodor’s, which I quote here verbatim: ‘Will you prepare a bath for seven o’clock, ten o’clock, half-past ten, midday, midnight, today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow?’ Think about it. Why would anyone want to order a bath for midnight the day after tomorrow? The book doesn’t tell you how to say ‘Good-night’ or ‘Good-afternoon’, but it does tell you how to ask for silk stockings and get baths drawn around the clock. What sort of world do they think we’re living in?

Not only are you unlikely ever to need the things described, but they overlook the somewhat elementary consideration that even if you do by some wild chance require tincture of paregoric, three opera tickets and water for your radiator, and even if you sit up all night committing to memory the Italian for these expressions, you are not going to have the faintest idea what the person says to you in reply.

Yet I find myself studying them with an endless sense of wonder. Consider this instruction: ‘We would like a bathing cabin for two, a beach umbrella, three deck chairs’. Why three deck chairs, but a bathing cabin for two? Who is being made to change outside? It must be the old roué in the party who used the book for private purposes and shamed the family by going into a pharmacy and saying leeringly to the lady behind the counter, ‘I’d like these two enlarged,’ then adding with a suggestive whisper: ‘Will you put some air in my tyres?’