Part 2

The sun had arisen, but long, sharp shadows of trees and boutique bed & breakfasts were still cast across this imperial hill’s broad boulevard, and at its zenith, the cloudless sky wore a navy mantle and ushered in the morning with fall’s dry, crisp bite.  The sidewalk, from our apartment, was set above the road by a minimal curb and bounded from the left by a low retaining wall from where olives, cypresses, and pines reached out as a cover, and as we walked up, the sidewalk narrowed and narrowed until reaching a point where a single stone brick was pinched between the road and wall.  Its full width was restored by the first major intersection and beyond the road lay as the aisle entrance to an all-female boarding school, in a palace once controlled by the Medici and later a gift to Napoleon’s sister, guarded by lions in repose and who kept a watchful eye on Atlas bearing the weight of the world.  The path swept to the east around the great lawn and onto a one-lane road with a foot or so of shoulder off the white line, fenced in by stone barriers that extended above my head.  At a sharp, blind corner was the pedestrian back gate that opened to a drive, exclusively for the use of authorized vehicles, most of which would be going to the observatory further along, but once around the side, stairs led us up, through the grand wooden door, and into the Institute.

The first order of business was the usual check-in procedures, office keys, the name tag, the welcome packet with maps, recommendations for local attractions, and wireless internet instructions, and signing a form to acknowledge that you would receive some minimal reimbursement.  Then we were led on an abbreviated tour with the most important stop first, the dining room and espresso machine, but then past the lecture hall where all talks would take place, blackboards and projection screens at the front, and a grand wooden desk facing stadium rows in the now-familiar European style of chairs and desks continuously extending from one set of aisle stairs to the other, then the central cloister utilized heavily for conversations and cigarettes at breaks, and then finally to our shared office on the lower floor, a couple of desks with a single blackboard and a window whose views to the sky were mostly blocked by dense bows of a large tree.  As we set to extracting computers and outlet adapters, the secretary off-handedly mentioned that if we wanted lunch, we would have to send her the order by 10 am.  I wanted lunch and the risotto sounded decent enough, so I emailed my order immediately after she left us alone, to assist another newcomer.

It is so beyond cliché that the food in Italy is spectacular, Julia Roberts having traveled there exclusively for the food the year previous, that I simply could not comprehend the notion of food that transcended anything my, admittedly, simple and vulgar palette had experienced.  Additionally, these lunches cost only a handful of Euros, so I was certain to be disappointed in the quality or quantity, and more likely both, and then I would be hungry until late, late at night, every day for the next two weeks.  When noon arrived, we joined the procession of attendees that had diffused from their offices to the dining room where stacks of clear plastic clamshells, steam quickly condensing and fogging the view of the food inside, were placed and sat ourselves down with plastic utensils.  One spoonful was mind-altering, an elevation and clearness of soul to risotto ecstasy, creamy but with a bright, funky bite of aged Parmigiano Reggiano, and mouthful after mouthful seemed to do little to empty the dish, and on and on went this heightened bliss, the entire room in utter silence save clicks of plastic on plastic.  I ordered the risotto every week day I was at the Institute, and only once was lunch merely adequate, a mundane, terrestrial experience, the day when all of the staff were on holiday and nearly all of Italy was closed down, November 1, All Saints’ Day, when we couldn’t order from the Institute anyway.

The rather awkward thing about this was that November 1 was the second day of the workshop, so the lights were off when we arrived at the Institute, no talks were scheduled, and hardly anyone else made the trek up the hill that morning.  This was, then, a good excuse to leave early at midday to find lunch first, but this required walking up, down, and around roads throughout Oltrarno searching for anything that was possibly open, until finally finding an alimentare with a passable pasta al forno that I am sure had been sitting and drying out in the glass warming case for a couple of hours. Nourished nevertheless, our first destination was Piazzale Michelangelo, a grand square elevated above the river featuring a bronze cast David amongst the parked cars and hawkers squatting over their blankets covered in worthless thin plastic tchotchkes of the nude warrior lining the railing.  The side parallel to the Arno was stacked, shoulder to shoulder, with tourists ingesting the view, with the Duomo, Florence’s cathedral topped with Brunelleschi’s terracotta tiled dome, the first since antiquity’s Pantheon and the largest until Michelangelo’s at St. Peter’s, flanked on the left by the Vecchios, both Palazzo and Ponte, and on the right by Santa Croce and the city’s Great Synagogue with its contrasting turquoise dome.  Once we had drunk our fill, we continued downhill, past the stairs bounded by a feral cat sanctuary, through the archway in the inner city walls, and across a bridge into the heart of the old city.

I was a reasonably observant, but perhaps not wholeheartedly devout, Catholic, and my flatmate had been baptized though had long since enjoyed the liberation of practical atheism, but had still, begrudgingly, agreed to join me on the immersive cultural excursion to the one activity that was definitely open and accepting today.  Though a holy day of obligation in the country principally associated by its relationship with the Church, pews were only prepared for the mass in tight rows under the apse, encircling the altar, a long, echoing walk from the Duomo’s arch doors.  To maintain its empyreal reverence, the heart of the cathedral was cordoned off during open visiting hours, keeping casual sightseers to the periphery, close to the tombs or statues or 1€ votive candles to implore Mary’s intercession, and anyway the austere ceiling of the nave was whitewashed, accented by a few windows, but nothing much to look at.  However, for a mass or adoration, the faithful genuflected directly under the mural of the Last Judgement, a cosmic Dantean vision of the punishments of sinners and rewards of the saints, Jesus illuminated by the rays of the sun, seated under the banner carried aloft by a seraph and bearing Pilate’s judgement “ECCE HOMO”, and smaller, opposite, though grotesquely more engaging to the eye was Satan, horned, wings menacingly stretched, in the process of devouring two lost souls while the ranks of his demons set to torturing others in curiously evil ways with tridents or molten metal rods.  My gaze often drifted domeward as the words were Italian, but the order of mass was familiar, so I understood little save E con il tuo spirito, whose English transliteration had just recently replaced the response “And also with you,” ingrained into every American Catholic born since Vatican II.