Florence, Italy
“Dante is definitely a typical Florentine guy,” says Tommaso Ranfagni, a 33-year-old art historian and consummate Florentine. “Dante is sharp, straightforward, and he thinks his city is the best anywhere. He has opinions about other people, which he expresses clearly and directly. He has opinions about everyone. Dante is a pain in the ass.”
It never occurred to me to think of one of the pillars of world civilization as a local guy, but it makes sense. He’s often speaking about Florentine politics, and it’s almost always personal. I wonder what it was like to have had Dante as a neighbor: “Hey, Alighieri, you put my grandfather in hell! What’s wrong with you?”
“Dante is like a political cartoonist,” says Tommaso. “You know how they take someone’s chief characteristic and exaggerate it, like a nose or a chin, but with Dante it’s about the nature of their character.”
Tommaso loves Dante, an affection encouraged by a high school teacher who took him under his wing and nurtured his artistic sensibility. “He was obsessed with Dante,” Tommaso says of his old professor. “When he was in school, students had to memorize large part of the commedia. But you wanted to, because Dante is a national hero. This was especially true of the working classes, people who were proud to call Dante fellow citizens, especially Tuscans and Florentines.”
Tommaso and I are at lunch in a small osteria behind the Piazza della Signoria, called Vini e Vecchi Sapori, owned by his friend. “It’s your typical old Florence restaurant,” says Tommaso. “Simple food, tasty, not expensive, not too many tourists.” I have pici with artichokes and he orders a large plate of tripe with tomato sauce. We wash it down with a carafe of red wine. “Again, nothing fancy,” says Tommaso. “It’s the house wine, but very good.”
Tommaso specializes in the Italian renaissance. He was recently part of a team restoring the Siena cathedral. But he’s getting tired of the renaissance—”all the allegory and iconography I have to know and explain,” he says. So he wants to do more contemporary art now that Florence is building more of a contemporary art scene. He’s also ambivalent about his hometown, which he argues doesn’t belong to him or to Florentines anymore.
“My family has lived here forever,” says Tommaso. “You can only find the last name ‘Ranfagni’ in Tuscany, but the city doesn’t belong to us anymore. It’s all tourism.”
We leave the restaurant and start to walk. “Forget about parking here,” says Tommaso. “Too crowded and tourists have right of way in the streets. You can’t find any markets to buy food here because it’s too expensive, so no one from here can afford to live here anymore.”
There are 40 American colleges with programs of some sort here in Florence. Between the thousands of American students in the city every semester and wealthy tourists from the United States and Europe, rents have gone up and the fabric of the city has changed. Most peculiar is the fact that a city packed with tourists during the day is virtually empty at night.
“All the places where Florentines used to hang out are now empty,” says Tommaso. “There was a real city life here. But now it’s empty at night. Some stupid kid wrote graffiti on the baptistery right next to il Duomo, which would have been impossible if this was a real city center still. But no one lives here. It’s all big stores, fashion chains.”
We pass a Gucci to the left, an Armani, Benetton, etc. “They wanted to open a McDonald’s next to il Duomo,” says Tommaso of the Florence cathedral, commonly referred to as il Duomo, after Brunelleschi completed the famous dome that would become his masterpiece. “I think the city finally said no to McDonald’s.”
As we passed il Duomo, I noted that the guy who has a tobacco shop on the corner must be doing very well. He can hand it down to his progeny like a goose that will always lay golden eggs. “Anyone who has work tied tourism must be doing okay,” I say.
“Sure,” says Tommaso, “but not everyone does. My father, for instance, a working class guy who worked as a postman until he retired, the tourism doesn’t do him much good.”
The problem isn’t tourism itself, he says. “The issue is that people come and they don’t care about what they’re looking at. They were here. They got their selfie in front of il Duomo. They won’t even remember later. I can’t blame them—they’re on a tour of Rome, Venice, now Florence, it all melts into each other. They just want to check it off their list.”
Tommaso admits that in some way the mass tourism that he says began in the 1980s rescued the city from a much worse economic fate. “All of the other things we used to be known for went away, or we didn’t care,” he says. “See all the Japanese people walking around. Many are tourists but some live here. They came to learn our various trades, like textiles, or shoemaking, or leatherwork. They apprenticed themselves to our masters, who were happy to have someone to teach, because our people didn’t care about it anymore. They thought these weren’t real jobs. And now look how the Japanese have mastered these crafts and excelled. What we have left is renaissance art.”
Not that many Florentines care about their legacy, according to Tommaso. “No, if you think guys I went to high school with care about the art or something, no way.” As if on cue, a woman stops us in the street and asks Tommaso a question.
“Did you hear that?” he asks me. “She has a Florentine accent and she asked if this is the street where Dante lived. See, all the Italians, the Tuscans and Florentines are very proud: ‘Oh yes, Dante is great,’ they say, ‘our poet,’ but they don’t really care, or know anything about him.”
We are indeed in the middle of the small medieval city where Dante lived. A placard on the corner of a small building notes a strange but obvious fact. This is the church where Dante married his wife—and where he first saw Beatrice Portinari, the teenager who, in his poetry and vision, would become the immortal beloved who would lead the poet to God’s light.
“Dante’s language is like a stone,” says Tommaso, “like pietra forte,” he says, pointing to a yellowish stone that was regularly used in Florentine architecture. “It’s simple, plain, strong. Just one word can build a world.”
For the next few days, Tommaso would be my Virgil, who showed me his city and helped me understand it.
