Part 3

Little of the workshop was planned in advance, the idea being that spontaneity was a spark vital for the germination of new ideas, and anyway the nature of the highly fluctuating attendance week-by-week and day-by-day, often decided at the last minute, prevented firm scheduling of a speaker at the time of invitation.  Instead, the talk in a few days time was assigned on a volunteer basis, and if that failed, with gentle suggestions during the lunch hour, when everyone chatted convivially and any barriers to acceptance had been lowered by a couple glasses of wine.  There was yet one vacancy in the calendar on Monday, and my flatmate and I sat side by side, across the table from one of the organizers when the question was asked.  We had, starting about a year ago, collaborated on a project which ultimately lead to a publication that spring that had received an encouraging response from the community as an original way to look at a problem in collider physics.  In the months since, I presented talks on this work at topical conferences and for small group seminars and as a consequence had honed my presentation, while my flatmate had avoided public speaking, though attended much the same conferences I had, and so I interpreted this as tacit approval to agree to be the one to fill the hour on Monday.

As the mid-afternoon doldrums hit, we filtered up to the dining room again, and the few that had arrived before us were already deep in lively debate of the politics of one country or another.  This was Italy and this was espresso time, and I joined out of external social pressure rather than a love or need of coffee, which, before this week, I had drank of very little.  The air of the room was heavy with the stench of burnt beans atomized into steam and expelled from the machine into beige plastic demitasse, and I joined the queue, then walked to an open seat bearing the drink and a stick packet of sugar, the only way that I could stomach it.  A whole packet of sugar for one shot of espresso rendered what was in the cup thick and syrupy and I was able, just, to maintain a straight face while I sipped, but needed the strength of all my faculties to do so, and did not engage in the conversation.  Every day I did this, and every day about 30 minutes later, jitters would take over and I would crash, humorous head-on-keyboard style, slumped in my chair for a nap before I could wrest control from this vile drink.  Convinced that this was the fault of the coffee, I swore off the stuff when I returned home, ordering a hot chocolate while my girlfriend ordered a latte, and only minimally engaged with it when I would return to Europe.  Years later, when I had come to adore black, unadulterated pour-over coffee for its therapeutic properties to children screaming at hours of the day I had previously been unaware existed, it finally dawned on me that my issues with Italian espresso had not been the espresso at all, but the sugar.

My Ph.D. advisor was a highly cultured, worldly individual, known far and wide by his universally-adopted textbook on quantum field theory, often telling a story of visiting a women’s college in Tokyo where he was to be met at the subway station by his hosts, but not informed how he would recognize them.  Off the platform and up the stairs he went, and there were three young women, broadly smiling, each proudly bearing a copy of his book.  After physics, it seemed the one thing of which he was most knowledgable was opera, often making obscure allusions to some egregious betrayal in aria during a physics seminar that was typically met with silent confusion by the rest of the audience.  I had accompanied him on a number of conference road trips up and down the West Coast, and one particularly memorable drive was on the 9 hour trek to Eugene, weaving up Siskiyou Pass in a pounding late winter rainstorm, his lead foot accelerating his VW Golf past 85 miles per hour, and Aida blasting at near pain volumes, hands off the wheel conducting the orchestra, and explaining the minutiae of the stage and how the tenor and soprano were finally together, forever.  Though not in Florence for this conference, he had visited the Institute a number of times previous, and before I left his only recommendation was that I climb the dome.

Out of the apartment before 7:30 am, my flatmate and I walked downhill, backs to the Institute, for a small adventure before we set to work.  The physicist desires to explain the universe in a limited set of mathematical equations, which require a logical structure and repeatability, but such a strict reductionist approach, confining the universe to a box with a pretty bow, is but a few hundred years old and for millennia prior, people still erected buildings and bridges that yet stand, though Newton’s laws were never employed because they did not yet exist.  Some structures are perhaps not so impressive from our modern view, while others, such as the pyramids or the henges, are miracles though only because we implicitly and unfairly limit the intelligence and ingenuity of our predecessors.  A dome is another wonder, masses on masses that curve and extend over nothing, and as the size of the dome grows so do the lateral forces, until beyond some point where it would collapse, the sides exploding outward and the crown crashing inward.  A simple modern solution would be to provide extra support, trusses underneath or buttresses outside, but both significantly undermine the awe, which is an especially crucial quality if you are contracted to build the world’s largest cathedral.  After the eighth bell’s toll, the small wooden door at the side, under a mosaic of the Annunciation, a genuflecting Gabriel and the dove presenting to Mary, opened and we started the climb up and into Brunelleschi’s cupola.

The stairs immediately ascend, spiraling up an inner wall marked by regular balistrarias, tracking progress as windows of buildings across the piazza, then roofs, then the blue sky become visible, with occasional rest in a vestibule that housed the dusty statues of some old popes or holy men.  The way first opens to the interior of the cathedral, 70 meters above the altar, to a walkway that semi-circumnavigates the base of the dome and provides an intimate perspective up into the insatiable belly of Satan and some of the damned in the process of degloving themselves; Jesus is, however, a bit further up and opposite the path.  Then plunging back into the dim corridor comes the two domes and the genius of Brunelleschi.  On the right, a shallower, internal structure built of bricks herringboned together for strength and then cemented over that supported the external structure on the left, high, peaked, and magnificently bricked, the gem of the city, though itself fragile.  Two domes, individually either weak or simple, together doing what neither could alone, and solving the problem through pure intuition.  Now, out the top we walked and around the lanterna, well over 100 meters above the square, shirts stuck to skin with sweat, and took a few pictures, but were soon descending, as the Institute lay 45 minutes and another 100 meter vertical climb ahead.

That my simple, American stomach vehemently requested the day’s last nourishment before, say, 9 pm was advantageous when focused and directed toward a specific goal.  At the time, the top-rated restaurant in all of Florence on some popular, community-driven website was a pizza place, a single, small room situated in a corner of a building in Oltrarno.  By opening at 7 pm, there was only a short line at the entrance door, off the main street behind a row of bollards, where the minimal menu of half a dozen pizza options hung and we soon shuffled in, ordered, and waited at one of the three stand-up tables, great glass disks set on wooden barrels with bills, coins, and tickets squeezed between.  Simultaneous with our order, a pizzaiolo scraped up one of the poofy, proofed dough balls, stretched it with his knuckles, and then spun and twirled it in the air, and by the time we reached our table, the crust had already been dressed with crushed San Marzanos, calabrese sausage, and pinches of the creamy burrata and then slid into the wood-fire oven.  After but a few sips of Moretti, the pizzas, cheese still bubbling and mottled with charred spots like miniature mountains wearing a light dusting of white flecks of flour like snow on their summits, were placed in front of us and devoured, sounds of the multiplying orders and shouts from the kitchen drowned out by the divine pie.  By 7:15, we stepped out of the dining room, now shoulder-to-shoulder standing room only, and navigated the bunches on the sidewalk, a pizza box held aloft between each pair, and set to rejoin the passeggiata, just as night overwhelmed twilight.