Took a walk after class to another of my favorite Firenze neighborhoods:
San Frediano. The route there from where I live, in Piazza Santa Croce,
you just about see it all: from my mixed neighborhood of tourists and residents,
very middle-middle, lots of students, and tour groups
from all over the globe (principally now, Chine),
you pass, if you stay on the Duomo side of the Arno,
the chaotic, uber-tourist-centric zone around the Uffizi and Piazza della Signoria,
on through the stuffy and showing-its-age, formerly haute, now boring (to me)
neighborhood near the British Consulate and on to Piazza Ognissanti,
where the Excelsior and Grand/St. Regis Hotels stand,
and which is the site of my own timid, American-touristy, en famille introduction
to Firenze eons ago, past the now man-enhanced waterfall in the Arno,
and then across the river at last, via Ponte A. Vespucci.
San Frediano is a neighborhood where tourists don't often visit,
one in which they certainly don't linger, and which exudes the slower,
blessedly slower pace of what I like to think of as a regular Italian day.
It is the province of Old Men, those for whom,
for the sake of argument and artistry I place above age 70,
and who, it seems, would just as soon it were 1950,
and that the jet plane, and all it wrought, had never been invented.
And it is too the province of Old Ladies:
Italian women in their own 70s and above,
who once probably turned heads as they plied their feminine wiles,
and many of whom have surely lived their entire lives here,
and are seen today pedestrianating slowly, a shopping cart in tow.
It's a scene out an endearing movie, surely, if you look.
The pace I mentioned suits my own; I am of, but not part of
the motorino generation,which, for whatever reasons are in a hurry
to get to wherever it is they are going,
and not caring about the racket they make doing so.
I was early today, lunch-time-wise, and able to chat some
with the father-son team running the lampadaio stand in Piazza die Nerli,
which is the nerve center of San Frediano.
So yes, there are still, even within the confines of the modern cities in Italy,
beautiful, evocative places of mystery, and wandering through the streets of
San Frediano, you sense it.
