There is a church, in Florence, called the Basilica di Santa Croce.  As you approach the steps in the afternoon, the red-green-cream tilework of the facade is rich and sundrenched, an homage to the great eighteenth century skin of the Duomo just a few streets away.  Standing guard at the entrance is a ten foot statue crowned with the severe countenance of Dante Aligheiri.  This twelfth century Florentine’s  great respect for the Classics so conflicted his unshakeable Catholicism as to compel him to grant Virgil – banished to purgatory for having the misfortune to have been born before his own Redeemer – the role of Guide through the seven circles of hell toured in his  Divine Comedy.   In this church, entombed side by side, lie the mortal remains of Niccolo Machiavelli, Galileo Galilei and Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni.

 

I have tried, and failed, to think of any place and time in history where three such men could have been entombed forever together.  If in Athens there were some Olympian temple in which the bones of Pericles, Phideas and Aristotle shared company, that might hold comparison, and yet there were almost two hundred years separating the statesman and the artist from the philosopher.  Here in Florence, in the sixteenth century , these masters of statecraft, of science, and of art were practically contemporaries.  These men who redefined for an entire civilisation leadership;  art; the truth of the universe itself.    Florence was and is a remarkable city.

 

The view from the train from Venice made good on all the promises that the unprepossessing north of Italy had reneged upon, and unveiled my first glimpse into the the beauty of the Tuscan countryside.   But even then I was unprepared for the Duomo itself.  On my walk down to the famous Ponte Vecchio on my first evening I saw in the rich evening light this masterpiece of Renaissance design, coated in the tri-coloured tilework of later lovers.   The inset sculptures, the richness and intricacy of the facade all demand focus and yet the eye is drawn to the dome, arching overhead so vast that when Michelangelo’s original plans required a timber framework for its completion, he was told that there were not enough trees in all of Tuscany to furnish such a scaffold.  He had drawn inspiration from the Pantheon in Rome, but after fifteen centuries, his world no longer possessed the technology to create such a heavenly vault without support.

 

My walk through the Piazza della Signoria took in the imperious statue of Neptune in his fountain of leaping fish and horses, and of the replica David outside the Uffrizi, but the sun was setting and I got to the bridge just in time.  This was the only crossing on the Arno left standing by the retreating German Army in 1944, convinced by local leadership that its historical significance was more important that its capacity to bear the the advancing British.  The setting sun refracted through billowing cumulus put on the perfect show, and after nightfall I went to bed confident that I’d found the Italy I’d been promised.

 

You have to be even more pretentious than me to lay claim, even in your wildest moments, to “Florence syndrome”, or “Stendhal syndrome”, named after the 18th Century Viennese visitor to the city who found himself driven almost out of his mind by the profusion of beauty on display on its walls.  Nonetheless, even without the benefit of a Classical education I found myself a little giddy touring the halls of the Uffrizi gallery the next day.  It would take weeks, at least, properly to enjoy all of the extraordinary artworks housed in the galleries of Florence and I fully intend to devote that time to this wonderful town in the future, but on this trip I had time for just two; the Uffrizi and the Galleria dell Accademia.  Just the external porticos of the Uffrizi, viewed while queueing, display sculpture of and by the masters of the Renaissance and before (mainly replicas these days), but inside this is  one of the great repositories of art in the Western world.  In this gallery, in one beautiful frescoed room, Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus dominates one wall… and it’s not even the finest artwork in the room.  Not even the finest Botticelli, the prize for which for my money has to go to Primavera, a remarkable allegorical piece which should be read from right to left, showing blue-chilled Zephyr blowing in the new season and mythological beauties greeting her and frolicking in her arrival.  Botanists in the nineties, studying this painting from the 1400s, identified over 200 different species of flowers and plants.  That’s the level of detail in the background.

 

On a subsequent floor I came face to face with the first woman I ever I loved, or saw naked.  To be fair, I should admit that this might have been in part due to the fact that she was the only unclothed lady visible in the data repository of Encyclopaedia Encarta, (which for younger readers, was the refugee camp assigned to All Of The Information during its brief but turbulent forced relocation from libraries to the Internet.).  On the other hand, whether a symptom of nature or an agent of nurture, it’s notable how many girlfriends since have borne her smooth unhurried curves and beguiling smile.  But I was with her now, and in the flesh Titian’s Venus Of Urbino, glorious in her demure inviting nudity, made doubly-naked by the flurry of maidservant activity behind her, looks peremptorily  but teasingly out from her frame, clearer and more captivating than any JPEG has ever had the right or the wherewithal even to hint at.  I stood there for fully fifteen minutes by the clock.

 

A couple of rooms later, Caravaggio’s startling take on the head of the Gorgon trapped horrifically in Perseus’ shield was enough to snap me out of my reverie, and not long afterwards, three hours after entering the gallery, I emerged blinking into the sunlight.  No time to stop and stare though, on to see Dave.  This was Sunday, after all, and Italy (along with France as an ill-fated trip to Dijon last year taught me) closes on a Monday.  So I had to get to the David before the gallery closed.  The long line moved ponderously slowly, enlivened only a little by the chatter of fellow Anglophone backpackers around me, but after an hour and a half and a pomegranate slushie, I was in.

 

No room for excuses here: I assumed this would be a box-ticking exercise.  We all know what he looks like, I’ve even seen him animated ridiculously by Terry Gilliam; frankly I didn’t think this trip was going to give me anything other than bragging rights.  “I’ve seen Michelangelo’s David”.  Well, I have, and he really is a long drink of water.  Exquisitely curated, situated under natural light in the domed finale of a long corridor, he stands, thoughtfully disinterested in, but towering magnificently above, the unworthy and bulbous mortals who throng and waddle and chatter in his shadow.  Polished from a single piece of unblemished stone, Michelangelo’s masterpiece of contraposto shows this lithe young man in the moment his weight is shifted onto his supporting leg, with forward momentum imminent but trapped forever in the marble.  This technique, rediscovered from the Greeks for whom its invention differentiated their Classical work from its static Egyptian predecessors, is one of the things which gives Renaissance sculpture its vibrancy and life – that and a certain morbid curiosity on the part of its leading lights with the intricacies of the human musculo-skeletal system, learned illegally in crypts and charnel-houses always under threat of discovery and excommunication.  David bears all of that accuracy of the learned and preternaturally talented sculptor, but also the caress of a lover.  His youth, seen up close, might be rather troubling to a modern eye, but there is no doubting the purity of the adoration which crafted his long smooth biceps, his taught abdomen, his adolescently powerful thighs and buttocks.  He is shockingly beautiful, captivating in a way no photograph or video could convey.

 

After all that homo-eroticism I needed a bit of a lie down, so it wasn’t until the next day that I ascended the dome of the Duomo.  500-odd steps (yes, they are odd – whoever heard of a square spiral staircase?) lead first to the vertiginous walk around the inside of the dome, where scenes of ascension contrast with a hellscape that puts one in mind of Blake at his most laudanum-inspired, and then up out into the sunlight.   Florence is quietly beautiful from above, far smaller than Paris or Rome and lacking the headline-grabbing architecture (as is so often the case with good panoramas, you’re standing on the thing you’d most like to be included in the view) but it’s consistently pretty wrapped in its terracotta pashmina, with sporadic churches and galleries to catch the eye.  Upon descending I went to pay my triple-respects at Santa Croce, and then on to the station, and the train to Rome.

 

I had too short a time in Tuscany.  I wanted to see Pisa and to visit Cincqueterra.  There was wine country to explore and the sea to see.  There are another two dozen galleries and churches I should like to have seen in Florence itself, not to mention the famous market, and the shopping and food here begged for another visit with a far more flexible budget.  I entirely understand the English upper-middle-class’s obsession with this part of the world, and (as long as I can avoid them all) I’ll be back very soon indeed.