Dubai 2345

There is a numbing quality to seeing Florence that damps the excitement of the art and innovation.  Unlike Chichen Itza or Yosemite - or even Milan - Florence was destined to be a tourist city, and deserves it by merit and demerit alike.  The numbness comes from commerce.  This was art commissioned by, for and directed to merchants, on the whole, though with a sizable slice reserved for God, for innovation, for delight, and for the artists themselves, in their non-commercial aspects.

One sees that the current, money-soaked, transparently mercenary art world is a repetition, and therefore largely a result of certain conditions that have recurred.  In today's Florence - I mean the historic core, not the ordinary automobile-and-supermarkets city that surrounds it - you are either a rich tourist, or a spiritually and historically minded tourist, or you are cattle, to be fed watery gelato, shuttled through a few key (but generally not best) sites, and packed onto rail cars for the ride home.  In Medici Florence, you were a merchant, a spiritual, an artist, or fodder.

I've had the time and means to travel to places that awe: Walpi, Durham, Uxmal.  And nearing these one feels a sort of embarrassment - the sense that one must tread gently, quiet one's thoughts, and be grateful.  In Florence, there is no embarrassment.  The city has you trodding on monk's graves - there is no other way to the ticket stand to see the cloistered spaces within.  There's no point in feeling sacred about the profaned.

So what to do?  How to enjoy and absorb such a city?  Straddle.  Find the smaller spaces of excellence. Casa Martelli, the Bargello, the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, the gaze of a character straight out from a minor panel of a bronze door, looking at you.  Eat simply.  Then take some time to be the shopper, the merchant, the crass, walleted animal that would go to the Gucci Museum.  Fight the nausea and understand - and if the Gucci Museum won't teach it, little will - that merchandising is the art of throwing fake pearls before those who've learned to imitate swine.  Go to the Cappelle Medicee and see what it means for true narcissists to go hog wild for exotic colored marble - at the Pietre Dure you'll learn that they bought so much of it, from the four corners of the globe, that hundreds of years later, they are warehousing enough exotic stone to last hundreds of years more, even if they were still building, and not merely restoring.

In the end, why see Florence and its like?  Because it is does not transport the modern visitor, but instead reports.  It reports to the modern visitor that our condition is simply a mode of living that has long been with us, in the merchant cities.  Aniline, pacific and selfish.