A Florence Diary

by Diana Athill

  I’ve lost my precious phrase book, so we aren’t much good at sustained conversations, though I find myself surprisingly quick at understanding what they say to me, if it’s simple.

  Now, having written this diary so far, I must go to bed. The smell of stephanotis is rather drowsy-making.

  THURSDAY, 28 AUGUST 1947

  We left the Hotel Bonciani this morning, in a shower of gold. From our enormous popularity at the end, we deduce that we must, as usual, have over-tipped like mad. It is so difficult to know where you are with lire, what with half a dozen different rates of exchange, and even the ‘official’ one being artificial. Also the Italians haven’t yet caught up with the depreciation of their money, just as we haven’t. Half a crown to us still seems quite big, although the Americans, seeing it from outside, know it’s only about sixpence. And in the same way 500 lire seems a lot to the average Italian, though it works out at only about three shillings to us.

  We brought our things down to the pensione in one of the more decrepit cabs, with a very sad horse. Most of them are rather good nowadays. Remembering stories of how Italians treat animals, I was spying about for atrocities but most of the cabmen I see are busily engaged in giving their horses drinks out of miniature buckets, or bathing their hooves, or whisking flies off them.

  Then the hotel rang up to say we had left some things. As Pen had already dropped everything five times, and had had to bob upstairs twice to collect things she’d forgotten and then been chased to the cab by a chambermaid clasping two side combs and all her French money, I said, ‘Pen! You can jolly well go back by yourself and fetch them,’ and flounced off across the river on my own. So it was rather mortifying to discover at lunchtime that although she had indeed left her canvases, she had been handed by the hall-porter, in addition to them, a very squalid suspender belt and a pair of dirty pants of mine.

  I walked through the rather slummy part, where workmen sit in the doorways busily carpentering genuine antiques – very well too – to a church called Santa Maria del Carmine, which has a chapel with lovely frescoes by Lippi, Masolino and Masaccio, and stayed there until it was shut up at twelve.

  We went again after lunch, so that Pen could see them, but it was still shut, so we walked down to the old wall and sat on the bank watching a very nice ferry which seems to be run for the sole entertainment of the ferryman and half a dozen little boys. They pull it back and forth on a wire, fishing the while with rapt devotion, some of them with Heath Robinson multiple rods, and apparently for the purest love of the sport as there is never any sign of anyone catching anything. There was an old man with a cobalt blue hat with long feathers in it, selling them something out of gourds.

  Then we pottered back into civilisation and found a wonderful Ghirlandaio fresco in Santa Trinita, with Florence looking just the same in the background.

  After that we succumbed to our British instincts and went and had a cup of tea in the English-American Tea Rooms. Then Pen explored some more, but I came back and washed my hair. We had rashly stuck our heads out of the windows of the French train, and became thoroughly be-sooted. After Paris it was electric, and quite clean. As the water was cold, I’m not really much cleaner now.

  We had been told that the food here in the pensione would be solid but not exciting, but we find it very delicious indeed, and most copious, and are stuffing to capacity. The best part of the food, though, is the cakery part. The pastry shops are full of the most miraculous little objects, that are as exotic as sweets and not much bigger, but more varied in taste and texture. I could eat them for ever. We never quite know what we will get, either. For instance, when yesterday we ordered (or thought we ordered) chocolate to drink, with cream on top, we got instead an immense double ice, chocolate and vanilla, which was scrumptious.

  I am writing up in the loggia, which is not a bit like the Spacious Loggia at B.H.‡ It is this sort of house – rather fortress like, and the bottom two floors mysterious and apparently inaccessible, with barred windows, and the top floors inexplicably well lit with huge windows, although from the outside you wouldn’t think it.

  Nobody seems to use the loggia much, we can’t think why. When I came up this evening after dinner, I almost gasped at the beauty of it. There is a moon and the sky is velvet blue, and the lights on the hill opposite are reflected in long wavering streaks in the velvet blue Arno – so lovely.

  Now we have been joined by an Italian girl who works in a chemist’s shop near here, and wants to exercise her English. She has so little, and our Italian is so much less, that we have ended talking in French, to no one’s benefit. She is nice – she loves her Italian things so much, like they all do. She has just said that when she went to the Pitti last Sunday she kept touching the pictures so that she could say, ‘Now I have touched something that Raphael himself worked on with his own hands’. I am going to the cinema with her one evening.

  Pen and I are sharing a room just for this night, as there was a bit of a muddle (caused by us), but tomorrow we move into our sweet little ones over the walled garden.

  FRIDAY, 29 AUGUST 1947

  I had a lovely morning today. Pen went off to see the things I had seen yesterday and vice versa and when I got to San Lorenzo, which she had said was lovely but hadn’t anything special in it, I discovered that she had missed the whole thing about it, which is that you go through a little door behind one of the altars, and come suddenly into the Chapel of the Medicis. They started to build it to receive the Holy Sepulchre, which they tried to steal, and when the stealing expedition failed, they finished the chapel just in honour of themselves, for their tombs. It’s HUGE, octagonal, and entirely lined with precious inlays. It positively stuns one with its magnificence. It isn’t a bit to the Glory of God – purely the Medicis saying, ‘Look what our family can do if we want to!’

  It is rather sombre and utterly overwhelming. All round it are coats of arms of the tributaries of Florence inlaid in great panels on the lowest part of the wall, man-size, and these you can really see close up. They used mother-of pearl and cornelian and coral and chalcedony and agate and porphyry and Heaven knows what, but each design is so sweeping and simple that the effect isn’t in the least fussy. At intervals round the walls are set vast sarcophagi of red and grey granite, and on each is the crown of the occupant, lying on a stone cushion set with enormous emeralds and rubies and sapphires. The frescoes and things we have been seeing are more lovely really, because they are true artist’s work, but this thing is so much Florence, and so full of the splendour of that incredible family, that I think it really excited me more. And next door to it is the chapel Michelangelo built to Lorenzo and Cosimo, with his magnificent memorials to them, and the loveliest of all his virgins.

  After that I only just had time to fly round the Bargello before coming back for lunch, and that again is staggering. It is used as a museum for sculpture, and is full of lovely things, but the building itself is what thrilled me. The courtyard, with a colonnade all round and a gallery on the first floor with great stairs coming down, is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

  We went to Fiesole after lunch, complete with painting things, on a very full tram. The view was misty today, and so enormous that it daunted even Pen, so that we never got down to trying to draw it. We went instead to the Roman amphitheatre, which looks out away from Florence, and is quiet and smells of thyme, and we lay on the grass and relaxed. It was country and peaceful and lovely, and we are going to spend a whole day there soon. It suddenly rained while we were there. The sun still shone and it became no colder, but great fat silver drops came splashing down.

  We’ve decided to buy a villa up there, with an olive orchard and some vines and a couple of fig trees, and have all our friends to stay.

  We are so lucky with the weather. The terrible heat wave they have been having really seems to have stopped, and I suppose they think it’s quite cool, but to us it couldn’t be more perfect. On
e is exactly at the right temperature all the time, without having to think about it – except walking along the Lungarno, at midday, where there is no shade, and then one does cook a bit. We sleep under nothing but sheets and a cotton bedspread.

  A large black hen lives on the roof across the garden from me, and while I was cleaning up for dinner there was a sudden descent of finches on to the trees – hundreds of them. They may have been sparrows, but if they were they were talking Italian.

  SATURDAY, 30 AUGUST 1947 AND

  SUNDAY, 31 AUGUST 1947

  I forgot to write this up yesterday – and anyway it must be getting rather boring for anyone else to read now, because it is really all ‘And then we went – and then we went’, and the beauties of Florence hardly need describing. But all the same I’ll carry on. Yesterday morning we saw Santa Croce, which has in it the most perfectly preserved (and restored) frescoes – heaps of them – that we have yet seen, some of them by Giotto. They looked so wonderful because for once they were lit, and we happened on the right time of day when the sun was streaming through the right windows, so that the painted walls glowed like ripe peaches. It must have looked more like it did when it was new and brilliant than any of the other churches we have seen, particularly as whole chapels of frescoes are still complete, not just patches here and there.

  The afternoon was rather pottery, taken up by trying to get into the Fra Angelico museum (shut for the third time) and looking at Pen’s shoes. She has only uncomfortable ones with her, and has seen some lovely sandals in the via Cavour, but as they are expensive, she can’t make up her mind to buy them. We look at them about once a day. We also bought some nyum nyums at a pastry shop, and had a drink sitting in the Palazzo Vecchio square. We allow ourselves either some nyum nyums or some fruit every day, as our only expenses beyond an occasional tram fare or entrance money, and sometimes a drink or something in the middle of the afternoon. In the evening there was a thunderstorm, and we sat snugly in the loggia watching it.

  I had a letter from Alfonso, offering hospitality in Rome, which tempted us very much. His family are in the country, and he says we could stay in their flat (I may add that he has one of his own). We don’t think we can go, as although we’d gladly eat any amount of meals off him, and let him show us around, we feel that we can’t actually stay on him, considering that we did only meet him on the train, so that the whole expedition would be beyond our means. I had also a p.c. from a friend of mine saying, ‘Come to Venice’, but I’m afraid that only applies to me and anyway as he’s English he would only have a few lire and his hospitality would be limited!

  On Sunday (today) we crossed the river and climbed two or three hundred yards of broad shallow steps, between cypresses to San Miniato. There is a great wide space, with a wall round it, looking over the town, and a monastery and a church that is said to have been founded by the first Christians of Florence, in Nero’s reign, and it’s all olive-orchardy and delicious. That was a heavenly expedition, rather like the Roman amphitheatre one.

  Oh yes, and yesterday we went into a little church with a superb ceiling, to see a Filippino Lippi, and there was a little mass going on which was being taken, apparently, by a ragged little boy – there was a priest there for the important bits – and which was for women and children. It was very solemn and charming.

  After lunch today we talked to a young Swiss sculptor who is staying here. Unfortunately he leaves tomorrow. He was rather delightful, and said that he had actually seen with his own eyes a fish being caught in the Arno, which made him breathless with excitement – but alas, it fell off the hook before it was six inches out of the water.

  It became terribly hot in the afternoon and our expedition to the Boboli Gardens, to find a vista for Pen to paint, ended in us flopping in the shade in the amphitheatre, which is too lush and Renaissance for words, and watching the people. We’ve decided that probably the reason for the Italians not being a very warlike nation is that they are exhausted in early youth by continual joggling about, and being made to walk at too early an age. Everyone seems to adore their babies, and they spoil them and pet them and dress them up beautifully, but the minute one of the poor little things begins to go to sleep, they swoop on it and poke it and jog it and throw it in the air and bandy it about from hand to hand and coo and chuck and sing, until it is a wonder that any Italian child survives infancy.

  We are both riddled with mosquito bites. I’ve got seven on my face alone, and Pen has had collywobbles today, although she has eaten exactly the same as I have and has stuck more religiously to bottled water. I often lace my Chianti with the Arno (but only in the pensione, where everyone else, French, Italian and English, drink it as a matter of course, and it seems very well filtered).

  There are lots of Maltese dogs about, but rather leggy, bad ones.

  MONDAY, 1 SEPTEMBER 1947 AND

  TUESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 1947

  Both mornings we spent in the Museo di San Marco, which is the monastery in which Fra Angelico lived and worked. The downstairs rooms are full of his paintings and those of his school, and the cells upstairs have each a fresco, some of them by him. The longer you look at the paintings the more heavenly they become. They have a sort of early May morning freshness about them and the people all seem as though, if you watch them a moment more, they will complete the gestures they are making, and you can tell by their faces what they are thinking, particularly in the big deposition from the Cross. We have felt about so many things ‘It would have been worth coming to Florence just to see that’ – but of the Fra Angelico it is superlatively and utterly true.

  We also discovered the peaches during the last two days. For some reason we had only bought figs and grapes before, and the pensione peaches are only middling. But yesterday we bought a couple of the monsters that cover the stalls – each weighing about half a pound, and golden coloured – not believing for a moment that they could be as luscious as they looked – and oh bliss! Oh rapture! Oh poop poop! They are peaches grown in a Fra Angelico Paradise. We ate them in the lovely cloisters, pouring juice in a very vulgar way all over everything.

  We had a great bustle this afternoon buying tickets for Siena tomorrow. The bus leaves at six thirty, so we are breakfasting at five thirty, so I’m cutting this short in order to go to bed early.

  Oh yes, we went to the cinema last night with our Italian girl. A very old, bad, American film, with the people’s mouths all talking American, but Italian coming out. We hoped it would be good for our Italian, but really one does have to have some Italian before one can improve it. The only words I understood throughout were ‘due milioni di dollari’, but the story was easy enough to follow without words.

  WEDNESDAY, 3 SEPTEMBER 1947

  DAMN! It began to rain yesterday evening and it went on and on all night, and at five fifteen this morning, when we were called, a solid tropical wall of water was still descending. We neither of us have macs or umbrellas, and after some debate I decided I couldn’t face it – one would have been soaked through and through by the time one reached the bus station, which is about an hour’s walk. But the indomitable Pen was not to be deterred, and off she went. Lo and behold, when I woke again at nine – brilliant sparkling sun, which seems as though it’s established for the day. I am so cross with myself for my sissyness, I bought an umbrella this morning (locking the stable after the horse had gone) and went to the Pitti to see again some special pictures, and this afternoon I am going to sulk up at Fiesole. Signora Rigatti says soothingly, ‘It may be raining like anything at Siena’ but I don’t believe it for moment, how IDIOTIC of me. But coo! It didn’t half rain, all the same.

  The mistress of the black hen on the roof across from me picks it up and kisses it and coos to it as though it were a puppy, and the hen clucks and croons in return.

  I did sulk at Fiesole, and it was so peaceful and lovely in the Roman ruins, where I stayed all the time, watching the cloud shadows rove over the
hills, that I felt quite better afterwards. The tram out broke all records for fullness, even for Italian trams. We stood pressed together, hot body glued to hot body in a squidgy mass, for an interminable thirty minutes, while the poor old tram halted and spluttered up the hill and at every stop people leapt onto the steps and clung to its outside like a swarm of bees. Drama was added to the last five minutes by a large American into whose chest my face was jammed, who announced that he thought he might be sick at any moment. We all pleaded with him and threatened and cajoled and implored him to concentrate on the view (which he couldn’t possibly see), and luckily all was well.

  There was a flock of Swedish students sketching the amphitheatre, who from the distance looked very decor­ative with their blond heads, but from close up were so ugly compared to the Italians. Their legs were either fat or skinny or too short or too long, and their skins were pink and their eyes were piggy. Pen and I have fallen quite in love with the Florentine men. The women are only fairly good looking, and some very ugly, but the young men are so lovely. It’s partly their marvellous colour, but, they are beautifully proportioned too, and the ones that mess about in boats on the Arno look so very right with almost nothing on, compared to skinny, paunchy, hairy naked-looking northerners.

  Pen arrived back just as I finished dinner, in very fine form having had a glorious day and picked up a most useful Englishman on the bus, with whom we both went out at once to have drinks. He was such an old bore, really, because he was a photo-fiend, who travels solely in order to take photos which he can than show to helpless victims. He was nice, and upstanding and presentable (although he was at Keble), but oh those photos. He’d done Venice and Florence by that time, but as he printed his pictures himself, he only had the negatives, and there we sat squinting at them against the light for hours and hours, exclaiming with such well-simulated rapture that more and more came out from his every pocket. We didn’t get home till one thirty.