The people in this country want to know me, and where I come from, and when I say, "Ohio," it is not a joke. We-Americans-and they-Italians-are sincere about where we live. We will not step away from home, but rather welcome the outside in.
Florence comes alive with the night-I've never heard such a loud, celebratory night. If ever a city was choked on magic, it would be this one. Everything is golden, more so after the sun goes down and the streets are lit by window displays of gleaming leather on gleaming mannequins. Gelaterias on every corner, sometimes two.
If the carabinieri were to order every tourist, Italian and otherwise, out of their city, the streets just might be bone-empty. The city workers would be left, with their long handled brooms and street cleaning machines. But they would hardly have any trash to collect, without their thousands of eager and messy invaders.
If you walk aimlessly down the streets of Florence, as we did, you will find corners that smell like leather because there are so many shops and their doors are open. The fancier hotels welcome you with frigid air. No one seems to dream of hoarding air conditioning to themselves.
After the third day of gelato, we learned to watch the portions given to customers before us, to see if they would get a generous three euros cup or a miserly one. Stay away from the piazzas, our friend Teresa told us. Every business on the squares pays crazy rent just to be there. They charge a lot, but you get to look at the Duomo or the copy of David while you eat your ice cream.
This is how we met Teresa: we were walking down an alley that led to many more alleys, looking for a shoe store with decent prices, and Teresa stepped out of a caffe and asked us if we needed help. We told her that we wanted shoes, and she began to give directions. She wore pearls and a neat blue dress and comfortable, pretty shoes. Her hair was grey and every other thing she said was so eccentric or good humored that I laughed. Teresa was celebrating not having a tumor after all, and she wanted to give back to God by helping us.
She asked if we wanted to go the most beautiful bar in Firenze, or just a normal one. We smiled and said the most beautiful one. What else could we say? She wanted to celebrate. She called us the 'three graces', because we looked so nice. (Italians like Mennonites quite a bit)
She led us around corners and down streets, explaining the history of Florence in connection to buildings we passed. She was an American married to an Italian, so communication was not a problem. (If anyone is going to Florence, I can connect you with her daughter, Raffaella, a tour guide, one of the best, Teresa says.) We stopped at a market, and she introduced us to Elena and her sister, and then Amir, a Palestinian. "He is the most beautiful man," she said. "He's married, and so am I, but we can enjoy God's creation, no?" We laughed, and were a little underwhelmed, but he wasn't ugly, to be sure, and very nice. We stopped at a shoe store next and she introduced us to Samuel, who promised to give us good deals. Everywhere she went, she told the news that the hospital tests had come back clear, and she was healed. She was trailing joy and leaving everyone smiling in her wake. It was wonderful.
The Riviore was a bar on Pizza Uffizi, overlooking the copy of David. Five euros just to sit down.(so we didn't) She walked in and said something like this to the man at the counter, "Paolo, God has healed me. I must celebrate with these three graces I have met. Make me something beautiful." She asked if we drink alcohol, and we said no, and she said she didn't either, though she almost could today, and she told Paolo, something beautiful without alcohol. He smiled and turned away. "He is a cocktail expert," she assured us.
He did something with strawberries and something else delicious, in beautiful goblets, and then he set out pistachios and chips and crackers and we stood by the counter and celebrated while waiters in suits bustled by and smiled at us. It was beautiful. It was all funny and grand, to walk into a place full of elegant people and ask Paolo for something beautiful. Teresa asked if we wanted anything else, and I asked, where could we find men's shoes, and Paolo wrote down a place on a card and gave it to me. I smiled at him, but judging by what he was wearing, he cared a little more about quality and less about price than I did.
Teresa took a picture with us, and gave us her email, and kissed us on both cheeks before she left to tell her worried nieces the good news. She celebrated with us, three strangers, before telling her family. It was the best first day in a city that we could hope for.
I have so many other stories that I could tell. Italy has been full of overwhelmingly kind people. The only thing I tired of in Florence was the vendors selling lasers and squishy toys and scarves. These poor Italians cannot find jobs, but I wish they would sell something less annoying. Scarves aren't annoying, I suppose.
Our last night in Florence, we sat on the steps to the Duomo and watched people. A group of young people sat on our left. I couldn't tell exactly where they were from, because some spoke Spanish and some English. One guy played guitar beautifully, using a pen and elastic bands as a capo. They were a little hippie. In the middle of a song, he paused and leaned over and asked Miranda if he could borrow the ponytail holder on her wrist. She gave it to him, and he said she could have it back whenever she wished.
"Keep it," she said.
"Like a present?" he said, smiling.
"Sure," she said. he nodded, and bent over the strings again, trying to read the lyrics from his phone.
We walked back to our hotel slowly, the streets more full at 10:00 than three hours before. When we boarded the train to Rome the next morning, we seemed to step out of a time machine, as if we had spent years instead of days in the golden city and now we had to learn how to breathe oxygen and walk on normal pavement and weave our way through normal, working Italians instead of a steady stream of people from other places.
