by David | June 8th, 2010
Florence is a lovely place, and there’s no way to set foot here without being touched by a kind of magic that makes one miss it for the rest of their lives. The only remedy for it is to return, as many people do, or move, as some do, or to visit it with a clear consciousness so that every moment can be savored. Time here is like the wine, and like the best sauces, delicate and overpowering at once, and worthy of savoring.
Because a trip often carries memories of great food as well as the lodging, it’s important to take care in selecting the hotel. Florence the city will see to it to take care of the rest. There are so many great works of art that it does indeed live up to all the hype, and there are many artists who still call it their home. The power of the city, its history and its present, are inspiring.
But of all the artists who lived here, there was none who missed it so much as a writer, not a painter, a certain Dante . The poet who penned the Inferno, Paradiso, and Purgatorio was born in Florence, and was engaged to be married when he was only 12 years old. At the time, he had already fallen for another girl, a certain Beatrice, who was only 9. He married Gemma when he was 20, and spent the rest of his life writing about Beatrice.
She doesn’t appear in all the works, of course, but tends to run through everything, and certainly reappears when he was working on the masterpiece of his life. It’s interesting and terribly sad, too, that he couldn’t return to Florence, and died in Tuscany . He is one of the most articulate writers in any language about exile, and one wonders if the ideal love he found and nurtured when he was a boy was also an aspect of that same sense of loss and longing.
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