Dear Reader,
Last week, I posted on Instagram about a recent trip to Florence and how I’d really wanted to share photos in real-time but hadn’t due to worries it might invalidate my home insurance if robbers were to strike after my announcing our absence online. I still don’t know if it would, but what I do know is that the majority of the internet continue to share their travels as they unfold1, while I seem to be carving out hyper-caution as my USP. Please do buckle up and enjoy the extremely safe ride :)
As these thoughts were the main accompaniment to that post, I said I’d share some actual Florence highlights in my newsletter, but promised they would absolutely not be of the full-slideshow-variety that might induce silent screams and frantic scrabbling for the close button. But then I was surprised to receive genuine encouragement (sceptics might say vicious incitement) to go full pelt, and really, comments stopped little short of suggesting I fire up an overhead projector and darken the room for an hour-long viewing session. What follows is the middle ground, partly due to their being a limit on the size of email you can receive in your inbox (although you may still want to get prepped and primed with refreshments).
So, to Florence. Although it somehow never quite ended up happening, a trip to my eponymous city was talked of for pretty much my whole childhood, so when we visited recently, I was repeatedly struck by how amazing it would have been for my teenage self to know I would eventually go there with a husband and an eighteen-year-old son. For the benefit of this scenario, I should add: you will also have a glorious twenty-one-year-old daughter who can’t come along due to other commitments. You will miss her at all times except momentarily as you pass a ramen and poke café each day, when you will appreciate not having to consider eating Japanese instead of Italian. But other than that, at all times 💛.
Maggie O’Farrell’s latest novel, The Marriage Portrait, happens to be set in Florence and so I was monstrously disappointed not to take it with me - it’s one of the few books I’ve bought as a big chunky hardback this year2 and as we were travelling with hand-luggage only, it had to stay at home, abandoned mid-read, missed second only to my daughter. But then early in our trip, I walked into a beautiful building through a side entrance off one of the main piazze and when I came to the area pictured below, I was suddenly struck with a feeling I’d stumbled into the setting of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel3. I later looked it up online and indeed The Palazzo Vecchio is the palace in the book (although it’s now used as a town hall)4. I revisited every day during our stay and its inside is probably my favourite place in Florence - it has such a feeling of stillness and history. It’s also perfectly lit and its frescos were my favourites - they felt more quilt-like than many others we saw and I found myself thinking about ways to replicate the effect, and wishing I was better at needle-turn appliqué, which seems like it would lend itself best, perhaps? Although I’m also thinking about embroidery…
Visiting the scene of Maggie’s story, which is set in history, I found it hard to mentally disentangle which parts were fiction, and kept imagining the tiger in the story prowling the basement below (I’ve since found Lecrezia’s father really did keep a menagerie down there, although I’m unsure if a tiger was a part of that). I also kept wondering up at those internal windows and imagining Lucrezia and her nursemaid Sofia looking down from them centuries earlier. You can find Maggie talking about the palace in this interview (note her Liberty print shirt) and there’s a whole series of additional mini-interviews here. My progress on the novel is slow as I tend to listen to audiobooks while walking or cooking, read on my Kindle at night…but sitting down with paper books in the daytime is more of a rarity, so as I write, I’m still in the foothills on p121…but it is SO good.
The other place I really loved was Boboli - there seemed to be new and incredible views (with that gorgeous blue haze that lingers over Florence) everywhere we turned. The gardens are large so there was space to be off on our own, meandering, chatting, and whenever we saw a bath filled with stagnant water, taking a photo of my husband pretending he was about to get in. Our son endured this as patiently as any teenager can.
One day we went to The Uffizi gallery (I’ve since realised Lecrezia’s marriage portrait is hidden away in there! Maggie O’Farrell mentioned it in an interview and said it’s practically wedged behind a fire extinguisher, so very hard to find - I wish I’d known as I would have loved winkling it out). Anyway, we did see some gorgeous Botticellis and the building itself is wonderful - a sort of long U shape with amazing frescoed ceilings divided by wooden beams. Although we also noticed an extraordinary number of ugly babies on the walls of The Uffizi too - at some point there seems to have been a fashion for painting babies with a look of wisdom, which really seems to fight their natural innocence to give quite alarming results.
This baby is actually way sweeter than most we saw, but I wanted to post him because of the bird he’s holding, which reminded me of an article in The Guardian a few weeks ago about character bags. I cannot implore you too strongly to click on the link above and then to scroll down to the second photo where a boiler-suited Sarah Jessica Parker carries a curious pigeon bag. I am still surprised by it, even having returned to it several times (My thoughts: was it really that strange? Oh wow, yes it was). Apparently these bags are less about function and more about serving as a prop. I think we can all agree this baby was way ahead of his time. Naturally, as you read this, I will be hard at work fashioning my own version…5
We walked around eight miles most days, ate, drank, took a siesta each afternoon, visited galleries, went to a concert in a church one evening (where a florentine orchestra played all the hits - Pachabel’s Canon, Bach’s Air, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons). And then we ate some more, because as my husband said, Florence is a city that eats. He studiously photographed the nine million pizzas he worked his way through with the intention of doing a guest newsletter, despite my declining this offer at the outset (for one so vehemently anti social media, he is curiously enthusiastic about sharing mine 🤷🏻♀️).6
At this point, the original version of this newsletter went on to talk at length (is there any other way) about Elizabeth Gaskell (it was a smoother subject transition than it sounds), but it was all getting too long and cumbersome, so I cut that bit and will save it as a treat for another week ;)
So in brief parting thoughts from the Minor Inconveniences Department, isn’t it absolutely horrid when your feet are feeling noticeably nice and cosy in their socks and then you step in a splot of water (possibly a more regular occurrence for owners of dogs with great flappy tongues incapable of drinking without covering the kitchen floor). It’s happened to me twice today.
Wishing you a lovely dry-footed week,
Florence x
Like normal people. Apart from wondrous Jessie who agreed, ‘Yes good idea not to post in real time’ and so will be welcomed into my civil Crime Prevention & Reasonable Caution Unit. Btw, when not consulting on safety issues, Jessie runs this brilliant sewing shop (where she also stocks my book 🙏) UPDATED: Three additional Instagram commenters have since confessed to the same practice. Clearly this could be the tip of an iceberg…
I was due to go and listen to Maggie talk about her new novel with my parents back in August, but then had to stay home with covid instead. Luckily they picked up my pre-ordered hardback copy and then told me how much I’d missed from the doorstep. It sounded like a brilliant evening so this was semi-painful.
Fellow Maggie O’Farrell fans may well be wondering if I thought to myself, This must be the place, as I walked into The Palazzo Vecchio, and I absolutely did.
Nb. For those not familiar with her back catalogue, This Must Be The Place was the title of her unrelated 2016 novel.
Just because terms thrown around as though every single person will know or remember what they mean can be bamboozling at times (I speak from personal experience as I’m awful at languages, pronunciation, and remembering things): Fresco - a painting on bare plaster; Palazzo - an impressive building or palace; Piazza - an open square in a town or city. Piazze - multiple squares. Pizza - 🍕(hold the pepperoni).
My heart is drawn to carrying a mourning dove. Over the summer, one came and nested in our tree and I’ve never seen a bird look quite so proud or serenely beautiful as she sat on her eggs. I feel so grateful that she chose our tree, even though I’m not entirely sure all her little dovelets made it 😥.
Nb. I’ve just looked up where the mourning dove gets it name to make sure I’m not submitting myself to grief by association, and apparently it’s derived from its sad cooing noises. That only makes me love it more. I may practice cooing as I stitch, glue, and assemble.
Readers of my blog may recall my husband is a pizza fanatic. Here’s a post about the summer he built a pizza oven in our back garden, and here’s the how-to guide he later wrote at reader request, which is still being downloaded to this day (every now and then someone will send me a photo of their just-built oven and I’ll have a fleeting sense of our families being linked by sunny woodsmoked evenings and what a nice thing that is. Although ours is currently quite cobwebby as it needs some repairs).
On the linking front, several weeks ago, my mum sent me a copy of Horatio Clare’s The Light in the Dark: A Winter Journal after falling in love with its beautiful cover. It sat by my bedside unread until Sunday morning when my husband felt ill and I offered to read to him*. I picked up Light in the Dark, and opened it to find Horatio’s first journal entry is 16th October (which was that day’s date). What weird synchronicity. And I really loved that day’s entry too, which noted of a pair of swallows: Late-breeding adults, they will have raised two broods. On their way now and travelling, they will not really stop anywhere long. In a month or so from now they will be around the Congo and Cameroon, twinning the world, linking every raised head and every eye that sees them. Isn’t that a gorgeous thought. All of it, but most especially the bolded bit.
* The reality was more of an endurance activity on his part: ‘Okay, but pick something where I can just listen to the sound of your voice and not something where I actually have to pay attention to the words.’ He liked the words more than anticipated, but then after fifteen pages asked if I could stop, at which point I told him I was off to read to my other husband and left him to sleep.
I just loved this account of your trip ! You are an excellent writer!
Lovely to read this, thank you. Now I too wish I was back in Florence with Maggie's new book (which I haven't yet bought as I'm trying to buy less and borrow/kindle more. That's not going well). However, just before I visited a friend in Florence in July (very hot, phew...) I did read a book you'd recommended in an earlier email. Sarah Winman's Still Life. I loved it, Florence, so a big thank you for that mention. I was shocked to read about the 1966 floods as I've been going to Florence for work, study, love for many years...decades in fact, and I never knew about them. Coincidentally in July I saw some old black and white photos of the flood's damage in the entrance to the Stefano Bardini museum and thought of you and Still Life again (and talking of Bardini I'm wondering if you also made it to the Bardini gardens, not as impressive or vast as Boboli, but it has a lot of quiet spots to sit and contemplate, and the cafe there is lovely).