THE PEN IS MORE PORTABLE THAN THE SWORD

FLORENCE

Pisa airport is yet another bus station in disguise. There is no reason for it to be other than to allow planes to land or take off and so, that’s about as much effort as anybody put into building it. I find this highly acceptable because if there’s one place on earth that doesn’t need to answer to anybody when it comes to building - or creating just about anything at all - it’s anywhere in Italy. The fact that I couldn’t fly straight into Florence is appreciated. I like the idea of keeping the air traffic away from one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen.

I take a two hour bus ride to Florence which passes without incident. Outside of the windows, there’s nothing but fields and traffic. Take away the traffic and you can easily be in any year you care to choose. I can’t imagine a whole lot having changed out there for the longest of times and yet I am the only person who will have noticed this. The same cannot be said for everybody else on the bus who happen to be Japanese, all of whom have their faces buried in phones and huge tablets. How is it they are able to video-talk across the airwaves with people back home whilst I can’t even get enough of a connection to send a simple message back home to say I have landed?

Approaching Florence itself, the traffic builds up fast. It’s early on a Friday evening and I would guess that this is people going home from work. You can’t escape The Race no matter where you are if you choose to be part of it, even in the city that gave birth to everything that’s worth a damn in this world. You may have gathered by now that I like Florence. A lot. 

Milan is a shadow city compared to Florence - and whilst Rome may be the first name to slip off a map of Italy for you, it is nothing compared to Florence. Unlike Copenhagen however, I don’t feel at home here - not yet. I simply feel like a visitor. Florence doesn’t welcome you with open arms because it knows you have nothing of value to contribute compared to what it has already coughed up in the past. It’s a city resting on its haunches, never having to prove anything. It died young and left a finely preserved corpse on permanent display for the rest of eternity.

We have established by now how much I like to wander but my idle sauntering has taken me very far away from the direction of my hotel. It takes me until it is properly dark to realise this and twice as long to backtrack again. By the time I get to where I’m supposed to be, it’s what’s known in the trade as Very Dark Indeed. On the plus side, my hotel is a peach. Two friendly desk clerks squabble like slapstick comics to give me my keys and point me in the direction of the back door. 

Thinking it’s some kind of running joke between them, I stay right where I am and wait. The tag on the key-ring says ‘4’. I’m pretty sure I could find it myself if I tried hard enough but as I’m about to scope the joint and figure it out, one of them comes out from behind the desk, takes me by the elbow and actually walks me to the back door. 

Outside, set back in the breakfast courtyard, is what looks like a mini hotel. Two or three rooms at most in the quaintest little villa type thing. After struggling with a huge brass key to the front door that originates from somewhere back in the 1730s and having to straighten out the key to my room with the heel of my boot, I am in.

One of the best things about travelling with no luggage is that I don't have to unpack. There’s even a toothbrush in the bathroom which means I don’t have to go shopping… and before I know it, I’ve convinced myself that I am now John Robie (Cary Grant’s character in To Catch A Thief). It’s the shutters on the windows that make me feel like this. It’s no bad thing for a writer to occasionally slip into nonsensical fantasies about themselves. It’s the loneliness of the hunter that pushes you to those far reaching corners of the mind.

This particular retired cat burglar now happens to be quite hungry. I take a shower in a room that’s bigger than all of the rooms in my own home, leaning with my hands pressed up against the wall as powerful jets strip me of the grime of travelling. No matter what your station is in life, the dirt will always find you when you hit the road.

The dirt also has a habit of finding you when you least expect it. 

An hour or so later, I walk through a thoroughly graffitied underpass, along streets I half recognise from my long walk to the hotel until I find myself in a civilisation where it may be possible for a man to eat in relative peace. I take a short cut through a park, and perhaps because of how I look, I’m approached by dark figures I didn’t see hiding in the darkness. I’ve been to a lot of places in which people of colour are not welcomed and for all its glory, Florence appears to be one of them. I wouldn’t say it was an obviously racist city by any means - certainly not by the standards of some places I have been - but some animals are more equal than others around here.

I assume they are asking me if I want to buy drugs. I’ve never been one to take cocaine with my breakfast in any city, so they’re using words I have no comprehension of - none of which sound anything like ‘croissant’. I say a few things in English and they nod in understanding. There is no threat here. Just business and we all move along with what we have planned for the remaining hours of the night. 

There are some people - and maybe I am one of them - that seem to get away with being in places they shouldn’t be and even fit in where you are not wanted. Somehow it is possible to cultivate the aura of a wanderer. It’s an aura that suggests you are not here to take anything and neither do you want anything. Those people who report from war zones have this aura. It’s not only the fact that they’re followed around by a crew with a camera that give them the air. It’s a self-containment that says you’re just passing through and taking a look. I think it has to do with judgement - or rather the lack of it. Or perhaps even an instant judgement and then a total acceptance that people do whatever they have to do to make it through the night but the minute you stop being an observer, your cover is blown. 

I settle on a pizza restaurant simply because I can’t think out of the box imaginatively enough to be windswept and interesting now. The pizza comes, I eat the pizza and kick back for a little while to watch the creatures of the night come and go. Idly, I wonder to myself where all the interesting people are these days. Where are all the writers - poets, authors, songwriters - hiding out? I can’t be ‘it’ can I? But it appears that I may be. Apparently, there are far more important things to do than write poetry on the back of a napkin in a city of culture.

Leaving the money for my bill on the saucer, I head back to my temporary John Robie existence where I shall sleep and hope that tomorrow brings the flotsam and jetsam to the surface.

•••

There are some things I must see while I am here so I head out towards the Duomo - which I don’t want to see at all. That would be like heading into London and peering through the gates at Buckingham Palace. There are thousands of people who do want to see it however and they have lined up wherever there is space in the street to await their turn at entering the doors. 

What I have come to see is something entirely different. I flip through some back streets towards Piazza della Signoria and Palazzo Vecchio (which takes quite some time due to my refusal to look at a map) and finally find what I seek: a statue of Dante Alighieri. 

There are two to choose from (that I know of) and they seem to have both been created on a day when he was in a foul mood. The face of Dante is the face of a man who has looked Death in the face and come to an agreement with the entity that his time on earth is punishment enough. A little research on my return home shows the younger Dante to appear much softer than in later life. 

He takes breakfast one morning, wipes his mouth on his sleeve and takes to the streets in search of inspiration for whatever his next project is. Maybe he will sit by the river for a little while and see what may surface but gliding through the streets he knows so well, he rounds a corner and bumps into a figure who is known immediately by its aura and nothing else. He enters into a bargain with the entity. In exchange for some extra years on the surface of the earth, he will write - in no uncertain terms - the most detailed description of what sinners have to look forward to when it is also their time.

This is the day his face changes forever and his beloved Beatrice no longer recognises the features that stare back at her at supper that evening. Dante Alighieri has aged fifty years in a single day.

He is not the only man immortalised here (and boy, did it ever used to be a man’s world - men, horses, children and lions are everywhere, but women are nowhere to be seen) but for me, he is the most important. You’ll also find Benvenuto Cellini's statue Perseus With the Head of Medusa, a reproduction of Michelangelo's statue David (the original is housed in the Accademia di Belle Arti Firenze), The Fountain Of Neptune… the list makes a mockery of any city that has attempted to accomplish the same.

The truth of the matter is that Florence is a place where a man can set fire to his brain, send it sailing into the sky and wait with good cup of coffee until it sails back down to earth bearing gifts from the heavens - once upon a time he could anyway. I’m not sure anything great comes out of Florence anymore. It must be tough living in the shadows of giants.

This is the beautiful side of Florence - the Florence that is meant to be. The ugly side of the city comes from the tourists and none of them are paying attention to anything important. At a swift count, in the air at any single moment I see more than two hundred selfie-sticks. Tourists taking pictures of themselves in front of statues and buildings they haven’t even stopped to look at. The aim of the game is to be seen in a Place Of Importance. 

The photo is taken and magically loaded up for likes and discussion in their social media timelines. There are thousands of people here all doing the same thing and it makes me feel sick. I light a cigarette to see if they will disperse but the locals are nowhere to be seen and everybody else is too consumed with themselves to notice. Turning three-sixty looking for anybody with a real camera, I see none. This same ritual must happen every hour of every day here, every month of the year.

Once upon a time, this square would have been full of those with sketch-books and pencils. I think that’s the part I find saddest of all.

I stand beneath Neptune hoping that if I wish hard enough and throw enough cash in the fountain, a tidal wave might spring out of the river and send the crowds running for the hills. But no, here more than anywhere I see proof that the dead are more alive than the living. They have histories worth speaking of, sweeping contributions to the advancement and enjoyment of the human race, legacies etched in the annals of time. The living are simply acting out the plot of a Philip K. Dick story in which humans are composed of nothing but a stream of data endlessly meandering through the modern age for no reason at all other than they can think of nothing better to do.

Reluctantly, I walk away from history and find a restaurant with a table outside to watch in further amazement at the tricks of the human circus ponies. It almost seems like torture to become so preoccupied with the inanity of the people here but I rubberneck it all the same and realise I am falling into bad habits.

It does however, give me time to reflect in the midday sun, on a peculiar chain of events. In all of the time I have spent waiting at airports, chewing over my own philosophies, I have often wondered (and I know I have said this before elsewhere) if my personality is actually created by pop culture as opposed to what must surely and more properly be the other way around. 

My entire existence seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy of my favourite Disney songs from my childhood. Thomas O’Malley’s autobiographical swing in The Aristocats became my theme tune, Baloo’s Bear Necessities became the song that showed me how to live a good life and as I sit here, I’ve Got No Strings springs into my head as a mental flag reveals itself, reminding me that I once said if I ever came here, I would investigate the background of Carlo Collodi - the man who wrote Le Avventure Di Pinocchio (The Adventures of Pinocchio) or Storia di un Burattino (The Story of a Marionette) as it’s sometimes known. 

A lot of my childhood revolved around puppets of some kind. They were quite glamorous toys in the seventies but it wasn’t until much later I realised their cultural influence - and just how watered down and bastardised everything had become.

Collodi’s original story (first published back in the late 1800’s - and if my research proves correct, was knocked together to pay off a gambling debt), is vastly different (natch) from what you may think is Pinocchio’s story thanks to Uncle Walt. Back then, the first ending our little wooden hero had was being hung from a tree by a cat and a fox - in fact the whole story is a dirty tale of poverty and scratching out a living right from the very beginning. It’s also a tale with origins as old as the hills in which our ‘hero’ descends into hell and is reborn a better person.

Much to my satisfaction, the original story also has great characters such as The Terrible Dog-Fish (who is a mile-long and five-stories high), The Tuna Fish (who is as large as a two year old horse), The Talking Cricket (who Pinocchio kills for handing out advice where it’s not wanted) and The Fairy With The Turquoise Hair (which sounds like a story I would write but perhaps not about the same kind of thing). All of which leads me to believe that folk tales have lost their mojo.

I wander until I find the resting place of Collodi in the Lorenzini tomb at San Miniato al Monte. I salute the building but that’s all. There is nothing else to see here of the man that could add any more to his story than he has already revealed of himself. I smile along with the salute though and surely that’s the best tribute one man can give another?

I wander in reverse back to my hotel, through more crowds cataloguing their own lives for posterity, stopping only to stroke a St. Bernard sitting on the pavement outside of a newspaper shop.

Following another shower to shake off my confusing train of thought about Pinocchio being exactly the same story as Divine Comedy, I flop onto my cat burglar bed and write in my notebook about how I have come to see Florence as a city in which the Gods are constantly at war with a mechanised society actively pursuing science, but neither really matters when you’re A Watcher. 

Outside, beneath my shuttered windows, I light a cigarette and take a photograph of myself just to make sure I have been here.