Best Pizza in the City of Art (Newsletter Number 5)
Dear friends,
Long time no newsletter. Hello again! We are still frolicking.
Where were we? On Tuesday. We decided it was time to eat. Florence, devastated that we’d been allowed to enter the country, is crying from the sky as we are waking up and stumbling out the door in search of food. Even soggy and gray, Florence is neither washed-up, run-through, nor tired; it has a hand-crafted allure, almost like a miniature city under glass in a museum, rows and rows of carefully placed shops and bridges and splendid churches, unmoving. Our friends Jackson, Carlson, and Graham(son) let us in on their little secret, the best pizza in Florence — they want to eat it for the third time in a row, that good? We are standing on the stoop when the door opens at noon. Inside, there is a tilted mirror above the pizza-making counter, reflecting the image of quick hands flattening the pizza dough, tearing the cheese and squelching the tomatoes.
Given the circumstances, it would not be appropriate for this newsletter to describe the intensity with which we ate the pizza, Napoli and Diavola and Margherita. But maybe it was the best pizza place in Florence—we’ll never know, but we’ll always think it was.
Rainy days in Firenze. There is a mini umbrella in our AirBnb, small miracles. We wander toward the most appealing indoor activity, the Uffizi Gallery, which was every other tourist’s first idea too. The buildings tower overhead; instead of museum miniatures, they start to resemble crouched stone creatures, massive and still, guarding the secrets buried here: Machiavelli’s body, wooden scraps of Pinocchio, stacks and stacks of medieval art and Medici gold, the broken rubble of the bridges and structures destroyed by German mines, then rebuilt again in their ancient image. The guardians watch us, river of tourists in their veins.
We devise a rule for the Uffizi: we cannot spend less time in the museum than we spend waiting in line. Time drips down from the sky as we stand sandwiched in line, thankfully under cover. By the time we’ve swindled the ticket officers into believing Owen and I are European students at Brown University in… Spain?, with a particularly skillful deployment of Spanish—thank you, Graham—it’s been an hour and a half. Go, go, go! We see the birth of Venus, the coming of Spring, the slew of flattened medieval art in Skittle-colors, Jesus and Mary botched one hundred times. We’re each allowed to take one item home; I want a wall-sized map of Europe, the shapes and names all wrong. Art major Graham takes me to find the paintings that have depth, the Medusa shield, light used to show the form of things, their roundness and finitude. We pass hundreds of hesitant self-portraits, artists painting about artists just like writers write about writing.
We reach our time threshold, and also our caffeine barrier and the end of the museum, so we escape down the obscenely tall central staircase (conveniently lined with signs warning of MORTAL DANGER if we fall). Jackson finds us a cafe, where we hole up at a wooden table and order three different types of coffee-with-milk drinks that all look and taste exactly the same. I sugar my cappuccino and am content. I still have not solved the mystery of aspartame in the EU; then again, I haven’t tried to. There is also the mystery of the Italian eating schedule, which seems to involve a piece of bread and maybe coffee in the morning, and then—nothing? Toast? There are too many pastry shops with extensive varieties of “toast” lined up behind glass. Italy, I don’t think that word means what you think it means. Then, dinner and wine? This is the schedule we tend to follow, authentic or not. The rain persists while we melt in the coffee shop, and the sun slips and dissolves. Stone guardians of Florence nestle up for the night.
Quick change, and it’s time for dinner, which we find down a little alley. Thank you, Jackson, for repeatedly finding the best food we ate the entire trip. In a similarly improper manner, Owen and I attack the cheese plate. Owen, by the way, might as well speak Italian by this point. In the language game, our group has developed a few strategies, trying to avoid relegation to insufferable American tourist. 1） Speak Italian with what we know, using English only if there is a misunderstanding; 2) Speak Spanish, and hope they either speak Spanish too or will understand; 3) Speak a confusing mix of Spanish and Italian and also sometimes English, hope for the best—I’m locked in at a 3, I think.
Back to the Italian eating schedule—red wine with our dinner, which includes a majestic Florentine steak, by the way, then dessert wine with biscotti, then limoncello after the meal? What kind of operation are we running here? Whatever it is, this makes it easy to talk about art, words sort of falling out onto the table in between bites of tortelli. It’s not just because of the museum; Florence is a city constructed of art, by art, with art. Just by standing in the street or turning a corner you become the audience, against your consent. You see the wide streets, the Ponte Vecchio like a precarious village over the river, the green hilly backdrop that snakes upward to a villa, a medieval tower spiking into the sky beside the coffee shop. You look and critique, without wanting to; you see the artistic function of life, thanks Jakobson. You see how beauty is constructed. I start to think the only way to take back power is to become art ourselves, play the hand of reversal, and force the city to look back and see us instead. We laugh into the idea that we could be as beautiful as early spring, born naked as a woman, and placed onto a gallery wall with a drop of light and a thousand glass eyes and bodies.
After dinner we move to a brick place called The Box, another excellent job by the European English-Naming Commission, known for classic hits like Red Garter and Milk. We sit in a cubby.
In this newsletter and in my own life, I tend to conclude that it is always the people that make the city, the people who are the beautiful things worth seeing. But with our plastic cups and jumpy words, it’s not easy. I see us, but as tiny drops, pebbles scattered at the feet of ancient things, nothing against the hands that built Florence. We talk, and our words smoke upwards and are eaten by the rainy sky. The hulking stone creatures and their treasure troves remain. How to be a person, in this place?
Please advise.
Wondering why tortelli is actually just ravioli,
Frog and Iggy (Laura and Owen)
March 26, 2024