Heartbeats of Florence

I often try to make my daydreams as real as possible, if I feel a particular place or feeling slipping out of my memory. I try so hard to return to a moment, and it only makes me yearn to be back there. Even the most ordinary moments, like walking out my front door onto Via dei Macci in the morning light, feeling the moderate Mediterranean air and the regular noises of the city coming awake around me. The rattling bike, the child walking to school, the porcelain cups of espresso and cappuccino sliding and scraping the marble counter. The occasional car and bus engine, cut by the sharp noise of a moped. Conversations that I can’t understand but admire for their rhythm and quality.

I remember the familiar route down a few different angled streets, past the beggar outside the grocery store, past the dogs in their couture clothes, past the vagabond street vendors with their merchandise laid out for the day, the items always dependent on the weather it seemed. I could see the flower shop opening its doors, nature pouring out over the stone street.

I would switch my bag to my other shoulder as it got heavy and pass dozen of shop windows, half of which I had visited, all begging for my attention. Finally the duomo came into view straight ahead and I wondered for the hundredth time why this side of it was never completed, and why it is always covered in scaffolding as if the facade had an ugly bald spot.

Circling around the duomo into the sunlight or the shade depending on the mood, feet hurried while my eyes gaped, forever in awe of this masterpiece that keeps the city centered. Its intricate pink and green marble holding stories and trials the city has endured, written plainly on the marks of its surface.

I try to remember how I felt in those moments. Liberated, grateful, a little annoyed at how fast my friend was walking, but happy in the simplest of ways. Life just happened there. It was a thing to do, it was how you spent your day, it wasn’t a chore but a never-ending opportunity. To appreciate life was to live, and to partake in simple joys was how to survive. Reflective walks at night, meeting friends for a drink, shopping at the market, hiking up to see the view under a different sky, stopping to listen to a musician, following the footpaths of the many that came before…these all constituted life. Appreciating art, spending copious amounts of time with family, bumping into a friend on the street and talking for an hour, showing your love, showing your cares, and glorifying all that is genuine and authentic, especially in matters of food and drink, are all essential traits of life there. Italy is for all of the senses, and it awakened the passions that had been resting dormant inside me for far too long.

Every single day was effortlessly artful there, it was just how life was lived.