The hot glare of the sun on the other side of the green canvas forces me to open my eyes. It is only eight o’clock and already the air is suffocating. I unzip the flap of my tent and crawl out. Despite the breeze, the heat is barely less, as I stretch before the morning sun now blazing in a deep blue sky instead of behind a green veil. Then I stand up. What a sight! The city lies before me – Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral like a huge ship sailing on a sea of terracotta roofs. Born and raised in the country, I have never woken to such a view across a city before. This feels special, like a new era in my life is dawning.
I light my stove and brew a coffee. It has pungency in the flower-scented morning air I haven’t tasted before. It is thanks to my father I am here in Florence. After the stress of exams, he was kind enough to buy me a one-way ticket from London on the train. I had only been abroad once before, on a school cruise. Perhaps the reason for my father’s generosity was that my mother had loved Florence; or that after he remarried, we enjoyed no more family holidays.
Why only a one-way ticket I wasn’t sure. Perhaps he realised I wasn’t going to achieve the grades that would get me into university. I knew I wouldn’t because, perfect as I’m sure my answers were, I hadn’t completed any of my exam papers. I didn’t tell this to my father. So here I am, 18 years old, with the world at my feet as it looks from the campsite beside the Piazzale Michelangelo.
Setting off down the tree-lined avenue toward the Pitti Palace, I am seeing the world for the first time on my own; not just the wonder of new sights and smells in a hotter place than I have ever been, but the joy of experiencing it without reference to anyone else, whose mature appreciation might colour my own. However, it is the Uffizi Gallery I am heading for.
While a boy at home, I was greeted every morning I came down the stairs by a picture of a young man with a red hat, staring at me as if he knew something about me, or perhaps my future. It was painted by Botticelli. My mother died when I was ten but not before she told me of her delight at standing just with her artist friend in the empty gallery in front of the Allegory of Spring, Botticelli’s masterpiece, also known as the Primavera. I join the queue to spend a full day in the Uffizi, half of it in the room with the Primavera, waiting for the crowds to disperse so I can stand close to it. Then comes my chance and I am transported. The detail in all those flowers – I am sure that painting was the reason my mother so often wore floral dresses. I want to explore the allegorical meaning of its characters, Venus, Chloris, Zephyr and Flora.
Most of the renaissance paintings here have religious subject matter but the Primavera was the work celebrating something else, the ideal of Neoplatonic love. The man who commissioned it was Lorenzo di Medici, the ruler of Florence and patron of Botticelli, and clearly sympathetic to ideas not sanctioned by papal authority. I want to know how the Primavera escaped destruction in the “bonfire of the vanities” after Lorenzo’s death when the city was run by Savonarola, the Dominican friar intolerant of any art that did not represent a strict interpretation of religious teaching. Neoplatonic teaching held that man possessed a spark of divinity, in contrast to the medieval view of man’s guilt and culpability.
Florence is where I came of age. You might say my first visit here was the result of parental influence, through a picture my mother kept at home and the ticket to ride my father gave me. Yet my coming of age was in spite of my parents’ expectations for me, to get a business degree and a stock-broking job in the City of London. Florence gave me the inspiration and courage to express myself freely, without fear of sanction and in defiance of convention.
I have been back there countless times since to reaffirm my sense of individuality. In homage to Florence for what she opened up within me and for my work as an art critic, I competed on BBC Mastermind with Lorenzo di Medici as my specialist subject. I didn’t win but I was just happy to express my gratitude this way to Florence, for allowing me the awakening of Spring in my life.
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