Nevertheless, despite the fact that a green pass is required for all employees, some 20 percent of the Italian workforce, some 3.8 million people, are vaccine refuseniks - a number that seems to me extraordinarily high. This vaccine militancy isn’t surprising: Italy was hit hard by coronavirus, with people dying in hospital corridors. To get one, you must be double vaccinated or get an expensive test that lasts only a couple of days. Italy seems an odd place to come, then, as you can’t do any number of things - eat indoors at a restaurant, go to a gallery or a museum, catch an intercity train - without a certificazione verde, or green pass. She herself has refused to be vaccinated. The lady from California calls Biden “senile” and is particularly incensed that, in her view, he has curtailed American freedoms in the name of fighting Covid. Could less famous Americans actually be doing this under Joe Biden? When Trump was elected in 2016, a few celebrities declared they could no longer live in the US. Waiting for my starter of fioridi zucca fritti (fried zucchini flowers), I learn that they voted for Donald Trump in 2020 because of immigration and are thinking of permanently leaving the US “because of Biden.” They have bought an apartment in Portugal: they are serious. What do you think of it so far, I ask? “They need to sort out the damn parking,” the man replies. They have spent one night in Venice and one night in Rome and are spending two nights in Florence. At our local trattoria, a couple in their sixties from California sit down three tables away from me. The tourists are back in Florence and the city’s restaurants, jewelry shops and handbag sellers breathe a collective sigh of relief.
I bump over cobblestones where the mad monk Savonarola had his Bonfire of the Vanities, persuading Florentines to burn dresses, perfume, paintings, anything that might distract them from their religious duties - the painter Botticelli even burned some of his own works.
My morning commute by bike takes me past the Palazzo Vecchio, the magnificent castle that’s still Florence’s seat of government.
If I was her, looking down from Heaven, I’d feel pretty cheesed off. His wife, Gemma, on the other hand, who bore his four children and managed the family business, gets not a word. Yet she is the subject of many of Dante’s most intense verses, in The Divine Comedy and elsewhere. He met her once as a child and then passed her in the street a few times before she died at the age of 25. I hadn’t known he had no more than a passing acquaintance with his great love, Beatrice. Eliot said was “as great as poetry ever gets.” To prepare for my assault on the summit, I have been reading about Dante himself. I must admit I’ve always been too intimidated to read his epic, The Divine Comedy, which T.S. Signs remind you that it’s 700 years since the death of its most famous son, Dante, father of the Italian language. “Aren’t we all?” I reply.įlorence could perhaps be forgiven when it has accumulated such vast cultural and physical capital, built up over centuries. The trouble with Florence, says Ricardo, a local journalist, is that we’re just living off our past glories.