Margotlog: Florence: Beauty That Cleanses Your Teeth

Margotlog: Florence: Beauty That Cleanses Your Teeth

In the midst of a Florence spring, it's easy to be reminded of what price beauty. The trees at the interchange where I crossed from the old city into a quieter more modern area glowed with rich green. The sky every day for a week was blue as Mary's cloak. My one evening alone, walking along an embankment above the Arno, watching the water twine and flow, three mallards took flight. I could have been on a Minnesota lake.

Many of our Minnesota lakes and streams are polluted by chemicals sprayed to engender huge harvests. Many farmers want nothing to do with "buffers" of plants that will absorb and neutralize these chemicals. I can almost hear the argument: "We have big machines that till and harvest. We need all the space we can get." It's the soy and corn, Dummie. And voracious farming practices that want "carpet crops" with no true dirt around the borders, dirt that if left alone, could absorb much of the polluting run-off.

Italians don't talk much about farm pollution. Their brand of "showing off" doesn't mean so much controlling nature, as sashaying with speed or beauty--beauty as a form of parading the human/divine, Venus on her speeding shell, her nakedness a form of glorious identity, her ropes of golden hair another form of pasta. To eat is to be beautiful. To walk arm-in-arm through the family crowds is to carry your soul-food on either side of you.

Yes, I had lovely things to eat, especially at Omero's in a tiny hamlet high above the Arno called Arcetri. Far enough above the city that only a few lights glimmered here and there, but close enough to perceive the tops of hills still catching the sun, and the dells turning blue in the twilight.

I didn't like what the new steward of the Uffizi has done with the paintings. All the Michaelangelos downstairs in dungeon rooms with black walls. (But isn't that to protect the surfaces? No, says my snide friend, not much impressed with curators. It's because "black" is trendy.) I missed associations from years before. No longer does Venus on her half shell speed forward across a gallery toward a Netherlander image of piety, the donors tiny at the bottom. The Netherlanders now have a whole wall to themselves. And they're rather staid and boring, while poor Venus has no one to counteract her insouscient freedom and beauty.

Thank heavens no one has tampered with the wildly inventive Uffizi ceilings--those cornucopia of satyrs, angels, griffins, plinths, vessels--so complex and unpredictable that the neck and brain tire together and return the eyes to the floor.

I ate at least one, sometimes two gelatos a day, with pistachio and lemon or pink as cotton candy atop deep licorice, every combination an experiment, some better than others. I found one museum I'd never visited before, dedicated to Galileo, right behind the Uffizi, and so if you've goofed your entry time, as I did, and have time to kill, it's so easy to climb the stairs as models of the sky change around you, globe after globe after globe. Sky and earth, stars and planets. At the end I was no better informed than before as to what precisely he, the great sky-gazer, discovered or predicted, but I saw many many "mock-ups" of solar systems, a few that almost looked like they belonged to us.