1.04.2007
MAGGIORE
The rain paused me, a softening, lulling rain like a whisper. I saw its shadows on the pages before I felt it wet on my face. And I stopped. A sudden rain, the one of buckets, brings laughs and yip's and glee's, hopping over curbs and ducking under newspapers. Downpours, ones dreaded and seen from the dry lineup the window-watchers, becomes a mean dash to the car, a soaked, sometimes ruinous run.
So this rain, this misty thing, spotted the airless, ending pages of my book. It sparkled the red-brown square stones in the street. It invited the umbrellas out. And it made me pause.
[Florence's true name is Firenza, which creates a bird of fire in my mind. Poof! The ruby, all flames, glorious. Can you hear the sound the firenza must bring out. It would perch on churches, the high reaches.]
This Toscana city is a river city of seven stone bridges. One, Porte Vecchio, an extension of plastered square rooms, an extension, like generations on the river framed new bedrooms, parlors, and porches outward until those families whom centuries ago were waving their stitched insignias from windows, now share a wall. Those rooms, the ancient, stained shutters and folding doors, now are mostly jewelry sellers. Their stalls so valuable Mussolini once phoned Hitler to request his sky fleet avoid it.
[Don't burn the Vecchio. Or The Duomo.]
The Duomo is one of four hundred churches in Firenza. It is a giant, marbled in colors I did not know rocks became. Languages, upon seeing this wild cousin of Notre Dame, came up with snipped phrases like Oh my. Nonetheless, my favorite church of the four hundred is not the Duomo. My favorite is a lemon crate in comparison. Her name escapes me. She might not even have a name.
I am in this spot. I am under the grey Roman arch, backed by the great wooden doors, guarded by the six figures of robed witness. They stand carved in the doors of the stacked stone church. It's Piazza San Maggiore. Rain darkens my page, barely, and I must decide to finish the last twenty pages here, in the rain, with the droplets signaling like some silver mine canary. Or go somewhere else. Shelter.
Across the street, two beige awnings cover the front of a leather shoe shop. Women's shoes dance in the window display. They are knee-high, patterned, beaded, and fine. A proud pair of black boots costs 259,00 euros. Some brown ones remind me of slippers. One shoe, zippered and woven in a velvet, looks like an expensive foreign candy, and surely would be the nice-nice shoes to turn all rain into the dashing, ruining kind. The shoe store, Italo Balestri, conjures up an important opera or some Byzantine sea explorer and shares the small piazza with a news kiosk, an African art vender, a bottle-green traffic signal, and three bicycles, two maroon one white.
I just watched a woman walk by. She held the arm of another woman, friends clasped tight under the blue umbrella in the slightest of rains. Italy tricks me, blurs, hands me a glance, and continues on. Her shiny hair was silk; it smelled like the mint-lined path I peddle down in the mornings.
Oh my.
The sellers on Vecchio are brilliant like diamonds. The woman is a red jewel. And this spot, the limestone steps and the double doors built from a small forest, whom bear the six witnesses, whose crescent halos raise from the wood and whose robes bend in an ancient breeze, invites me in. I'm touching the lady's feet, the bottom saint, and they are smooth as creekbed skipping stones. Her feet are almost white from the rubbing. Begger’s fingers pleading for a fair day under the small cover of the church. Travellers seeing the dreams walk by. Mussolini in the war. A seller with canvases.
The rain paused me, a softening, lulling rain like a whisper. I saw its shadows on the pages before I felt it wet on my face. And I stopped. A sudden rain, the one of buckets, brings laughs and yip's and glee's, hopping over curbs and ducking under newspapers. Downpours, ones dreaded and seen from the dry lineup the window-watchers, becomes a mean dash to the car, a soaked, sometimes ruinous run.
So this rain, this misty thing, spotted the airless, ending pages of my book. It sparkled the red-brown square stones in the street. It invited the umbrellas out. And it made me pause.
[Florence's true name is Firenza, which creates a bird of fire in my mind. Poof! The ruby, all flames, glorious. Can you hear the sound the firenza must bring out. It would perch on churches, the high reaches.]
This Toscana city is a river city of seven stone bridges. One, Porte Vecchio, an extension of plastered square rooms, an extension, like generations on the river framed new bedrooms, parlors, and porches outward until those families whom centuries ago were waving their stitched insignias from windows, now share a wall. Those rooms, the ancient, stained shutters and folding doors, now are mostly jewelry sellers. Their stalls so valuable Mussolini once phoned Hitler to request his sky fleet avoid it.
[Don't burn the Vecchio. Or The Duomo.]
The Duomo is one of four hundred churches in Firenza. It is a giant, marbled in colors I did not know rocks became. Languages, upon seeing this wild cousin of Notre Dame, came up with snipped phrases like Oh my. Nonetheless, my favorite church of the four hundred is not the Duomo. My favorite is a lemon crate in comparison. Her name escapes me. She might not even have a name.
I am in this spot. I am under the grey Roman arch, backed by the great wooden doors, guarded by the six figures of robed witness. They stand carved in the doors of the stacked stone church. It's Piazza San Maggiore. Rain darkens my page, barely, and I must decide to finish the last twenty pages here, in the rain, with the droplets signaling like some silver mine canary. Or go somewhere else. Shelter.
Across the street, two beige awnings cover the front of a leather shoe shop. Women's shoes dance in the window display. They are knee-high, patterned, beaded, and fine. A proud pair of black boots costs 259,00 euros. Some brown ones remind me of slippers. One shoe, zippered and woven in a velvet, looks like an expensive foreign candy, and surely would be the nice-nice shoes to turn all rain into the dashing, ruining kind. The shoe store, Italo Balestri, conjures up an important opera or some Byzantine sea explorer and shares the small piazza with a news kiosk, an African art vender, a bottle-green traffic signal, and three bicycles, two maroon one white.
I just watched a woman walk by. She held the arm of another woman, friends clasped tight under the blue umbrella in the slightest of rains. Italy tricks me, blurs, hands me a glance, and continues on. Her shiny hair was silk; it smelled like the mint-lined path I peddle down in the mornings.
Oh my.
The sellers on Vecchio are brilliant like diamonds. The woman is a red jewel. And this spot, the limestone steps and the double doors built from a small forest, whom bear the six witnesses, whose crescent halos raise from the wood and whose robes bend in an ancient breeze, invites me in. I'm touching the lady's feet, the bottom saint, and they are smooth as creekbed skipping stones. Her feet are almost white from the rubbing. Begger’s fingers pleading for a fair day under the small cover of the church. Travellers seeing the dreams walk by. Mussolini in the war. A seller with canvases.
posted by TB at 10:55
