Firenze with her brassy grey and neat dollhouse-like streets – clean, deliberate and smooth - has enthralled me. ‘Ciao Bella’ reverberating in the wind, while you hurry past a string of cafes, the rows of art museums, duo mo, tiny glass shops lining along curved streets and alleys where every corner and turn promised quirky stores parched on cobbled roads. Wandering aimlessly into the Square with its throes of tourist summer crowd gathered around sculptures and statues while engaging in warm bubbly conversations shared with the locals. The orgasmic balls of fruity gelatos perched precociously on tiny waffle cones and gelato stores scattered like dimes in the dozens across the city. She holds its aspiring amateurs and student artists, carrying their pencils and rulers, measuring and capturing every light, plane and angle of Firenze on flimsy papers and sketchbooks; desperately trying to capture the vast grandeur and splendour of the Tuscany city.
What does it take to fall in love with a city? Nothing and everything because once you have fallen in love with her impeccable soul, with her neat clean beauty and history … nothing will be the same ever again. Your heart is stranded and broken and changed. And there running across Tiffany & Co, the Italian brands and their flagship stores, the ubiquitous ‘M’ fast food franchise, the dozens of gelato stores and the occasional art and book shops; you are besotted and beset with great regret. Remorse of the greatest strand because you are frozen by its beauty, its tranquility and its effortlessness; because there intuitively you know, before its time that you could never see your home city in the same way as you would and that every goal, every clouded dream would be spent trying to chase after cities.
And you stand there still, amidst the bustling departures and arrivals of crowds in the station of Firenze, for the trains and stations would begin to form a motif of your life, for ironically, the place you have fallen in love is the city that would elude and escape you the most, for she is the place you have touched upon for the shortest.
