Florence is the worst "Italian" city to visit.

It is also the first Italian city I'd return to.

1.

When we walked into the square, it was sunny and warm and full. We had just come out of Santa Maria Novella station, crossed the busy corner at Via Panzani, and walked down to Piazza Santa Trinita. The sidewalks were packed before the square, and moving down them was like exiting a sold-out concert, but in the square everyone slowed and then stopped in a scene more reminiscent of full cattle stockades. Thick mobs of people, mostly north of 50, the women in white cotton sundresses, black plastic sunglasses, and broad straw sunhats and the men in white polo shirts, khaki shorts, and sneakers, were all standing around and soaking up the real Florence. An amateur opera singer was emitting an aria next to a massive column while two string musicians on each side of him played similar songs through amps; tour guides pumped dry umbrellas into the sky and explained the historical significance of certain cobblestones. We threaded our way through groups of people just standing and staring at their phones, seemingly watching TikTok videos of people at home, and we walked through countless #ladolcevita posts as we edged toward Via delle Terme, a narrow street with buildings so high that the cobblestones only saw sunlight at the meridian. An English-English guide outside of our door was explaining to his group that many of the streets of Florence were intentionally narrow to protect rich people; it was harder for an angry mob of people to batter a rich family’s door down if the mob couldn’t actually fit in the street. We asked them to move aside so we could enter, and I thought: they really thought a mob couldn’t gather in front of this door? I also thought: if only those planners had tools like instagram and TikTok to dull people’s appetite for meaningful action.

2.

In Southern California, we used to say that Las Vegas was Disneyland for adults. I would re-phrase that: Vegas is Disneyland for adults who need a vacation subsidized by gambling concerns and easy credit. In contrast, Florence is Disneyland for adults who can not only afford to fly abroad for a week but who want to make sure that everyone knows where they are. The daytime behavior in Florence is generally more tame - less drunken poolside hijinks and more historical tours, waiting in lines for museums and galleries, shopping for leather bags at the countless street stalls trading on the Florentine reputation for quality and the ubiquitous “Made in Italy” tags, and a million selfies. The nighttime behavior is, from what I could tell, indistinguishable between the two cities. Another feature of the narrow streets is that sound echoes and carries from the cobblestones right into the top-story windows, so while we stayed in with the boys as the sun set, the streets came up to us: the primal bachelorette call-and-response that comes with the imminent prospect of prosecco, the menacing waves of football chants from roving gangs of ungentled young men, the muezzin-like wails that attend unreasonable heels snapping in uneven cracks, the drunken laments asking why innumerable yous were looking at unidentified hers like indefinable thats.

3.

I was waiting in line at the Sapori & Dintorni grocery store on Via de’ Bardi. In front of me, three guys were talking while they waited to buy cheap red wine. At first, it struck me as one of those inane conversations that people have about a city they have spent almost two hours in yet feel they understand fully: broad and confidently certain generalizations that show the limits, rather than the expanse, of their understanding. Then one of them made a comment about average road widths, and I got interested. It was quickly clear that they were studying urban planning, and their assignment was to to experience Florence, to examine the details of the layout of the city, and to describe why it was a more liveable city for people than Pittsburgh.

It was a very long line, curving through the chips and soda aisle almost to the meat freezer, and we were three-quarters of the way back. One proposed that European cities were originally laid out for walking, not cars, and the others “yeah, and”ed, and then they were trying to figure out the specific results of this evolution that facilitated pedestrian activity. It struck me that they were fumbling in the dark; as urban planning students, they didn't have any idea of how to look at an urban environment.

Finally, I couldn't help myself. "Excuse me," I said, "You guys are studying urban planning?"

"Yeah," one of them said.

"Have you heard of Jane Jacobs?" I asked

They looked at me blankly for a beat. Then, understanding that familiarity with Jacobs was probably expected of them, one said, “I think…yeah she was in one of our readings?” The others missed a beat and then nodded to catch up.

"What about Robert Moses?”

Not even an attempt to pretend.

I asked about their assignment. It was a softball task for kids studying abroad - they needed to do a one-hour Zoom presentation on Florence to their Carnegie Mellon classmates in Pittsburgh. Their focus was walkability and street life, and how to make cities more vibrant, and they needed to figure out exactly what it was about Florence that made it so liveable.

“Jane Jacobs literally wrote an entire book about this, and about how American cities are usually not organised for street life and people," I said. "You could probably find a summary of her stuff online and copy it if you wanted. She focuses on pedestrians and street life, and the way that cities in America are not set up for people to actually live in them. It all gets back to Euclidean zoning, from a US Supreme Court case involving land use laws in Euclid, Ohio.”

They looked at me closely, trying to determine whether I was either crazy or someone who could hook them up with extraordinary summer internships.

"How do you know all this?" one of them asked.

I used my stock answer for whenever anyone asks me how I have time to do things. "Oh, I haven’t had television for twenty-six years," I said.

Their eyes got wider; clearly I was insane.

I gave them an abridged version of Jacobs’ criticisms of Moses’ impact on New York City, as well as some things to examine - sidewalk width, mixed-use buildings, traffic calming measures, that sort of thing. Knowing they were at school in Pittsburgh, I suggested that they talk about how I-90 destroys any connection between Cleveland’s downtown and eastern and southern suburbs, and that they could compare and contrast it with the Arno, running through the heart of Florence. One took out a pen and started taking notes.

We talked a bit about the relative ages of European and American cities, and about the wealth that has flowed through them - particularly the newer wealth in America. I suggested that perhaps the zoning in America was actually one of the factors that helped America get wealthy - with specific land designated for building factories, would-be factory owners didn’t need to try to carve out a portion of a major city to build; it allowed capitalism to flourish by not letting little people get in the way. But it also prevented people from forming cities in ways that served…life. I also mentioned that Florence was not the best place for their assignment: because so much of Florence has been turned over to tourism, they couldn’t look at the thousands of people walking around and determine that there were elements of the city that made it “liveable”; they could only find things that made it “visitable.” (It only occurred to me later that this could act as a counter-example to much of what Jacobs laid down as guidelines for intelligent planning.)

A shopkeeper called them to a checkout. They thanked me, and the note-taker looked me in the eye and shook my hand long enough for me to think he actually meant it. After I paid and started walking back, something struck me. Their assignment, and their desire to complete it, were admirable, but if an out-of-work former attorney on an extended vacation with his family is giving a free Urban Planning 101 lecture to top-tier university students in the line at an Italian grocery store about some of the most important concepts in city design that they should have been exposed to but had never even come across, and if the desire of these students to understand the structure of Florence was interesting to them solely because of an assigned presentation to other students who knew even less than they did, how are they ever going to make better American cities?

But the one that shook my hand…I like to think he got it, and if, one day in the future, he is interviewed one day about the extraordinary anti-Moses changes he implemented in New York over the course of a long and storied career, I like to think he might start his story off with, “Well, I was in this grocery store in Florence…”

4.

When people hear about our trip, they inevitably ask me what my favorite city in Italy is. It is tempting to give them a generic answer with a generic reason, without overcomplicating things: Rome because of the history, or Bologna because of the food. However, I find it incredibly difficult to just give a single answer, because I am pedantic and it depends on the metrics for judging, and I want to believe that the person asking really wants to know about something in particular. Are they particularly interested in pizza? Paintings? Playgrounds? I can give them an informed answer if they can provide a particular aspect to judge cities on, but they will often respond with “Well, what was the best overall place you went?” or “Where would you recommend people visit?” If they ask this, I usually flip the question: my absolute least favorite place in Italy is Florence, but, if I was going to plan a weekend trip for myself, Florence is, without question, the place that I would return to first.

Why was it my least favorite? In a highly subjective review of Italian cities, Florence tied with Sorrento as the least “Italian” city we visited. Everywhere we went we were surrounded by the sounds of English - mostly Americans in groups, some British couples, and then a small minority of individual Italians who commute into the urban core to work in tourism or retail and need to sell or barter, so they speak fluent English. Thus, if you are looking for a cross-cultural experience or you want to interact with people with different backgrounds (which I do), Florence is not the place to go.

A consequence of this: the vast majority of the big things that are worth doing are heavily oversubscribed. To get into the Duomo, for example, can require a multi-hour wait in a line that snakes down multiple streets; most of the time, the square is so thick with people moving in every direction that it resembles Disneyworld on a summer Saturday. The Ponte Vecchio, the oldest bridge in Florence, spends most of its day as a place where people go to stand inches away from strangers in a slow-moving mass of humanity that feels like the children’s game Amoeba; people take selfies, but it is virtually impossible to see anything other than other tourists in the background. The Uffizi Gallery requires standing in multiple lines, none of which are signposted, and it can take an hour to get in, even if you have tickets for specific entry times.

Why would anyone go back to this?

5.

After talking to the students, a criticism of Jacobs started worming its way into my head. It has been years since I read The Death and Life of Great American Cities, but in my recollection, Jacobs focused on the skeletons and muscles of cities; she looked for the ways that a building’s placement in relation to the street could help or hinder pedestrian foot-traffic on the street itself, and how people interacted with things like parks, benches, trees, restaurants, and playgrounds. She focused on things that were measureable, because those were things that urban planners could copy and use in other places to (hopefully) get the same results. She wanted to give Americans the tools that they could use to make American cities work for their inhabitants. She didn’t focus on the skin, though, on the immeasureable and subjective beauty of a place. Pittsburgh is not ugly; on the contrary, it is an attractive, fun city, with extraordinary bridges and tunnels and the neighborhoods (especially the South Side)…but it is not beautiful like Florence is. No city is in the world is beautiful like Florence is and, as much as I hated that this beauty filled the city with people like myself, this truth is inescapable. It start with the small details - attention to lamps, mosaics, lighting, even the angle of a street framing a view.

The small, beautiful things accumulate so that as one moves through the day, the little things add up to big things and suddenly you are faced with a wave of emotion towering over you, and you think that this is not la dolce vita but la bella vita, la bellisima vita, that even if the town didn’t have money (which it has) or life essentials like amazing food (which it has), stunning culture (which it has), or a deep and proud history to draw on (you get the picture), one could come here and live a full and excellent life simply surrounded by beauty. In the presence of this kind of beauty, other concerns might start to fall away - the desire for wealth, the craving for status, the ambition for power. Such beauty brings us out of our selves and into something…divine.

And then there are the big things which don’t need to accumulate to make one think that there must be a God.

First there was the obligatory line snaking out the door, security checks, opened backpacks, waving wands, too many people trying to repack their bags and pockets in too small a space. Then we walked in, turned the corner and, half a football field away, there he was, mobbed by people, completely perfect in every way. I’m not one to be easily star-struck, but I involuntarily stopped breathing as soon as I saw him. It? Him, definitely him, because David is more than a statue, and even looking at this picture makes me gasp. One can see why Michelangelo described him as an angel; as with the Last Supper, being in his presence means that time doesn’t pass in quite the same way. The gallery employs people to walk through the crowds and hush people, because just seeing him makes people speak louder.

It is easy to forget that there is an entire gallery of other exquisite art around David - things that, in other museums, would command focus and attention and respect. And we went around to see much of it, and much of it was probably truly exquisite. But after a while, I told Alice I wanted to go back to see David again, just to be in his presence; Daniel said he wanted to come with me. We walked back into the main hall, holding hands, and then Daniel said, “Daddy, I want to show you something.” He dropped my hand, and then moved back a step and arranged himself.

It is the beauty that causes so many tourists like us to flock to Florence, far more than the tiny sidewalks, one-way streets, a river cutting through its heart and limiting interactions between the banks to what the bridges can support, and it is the beauty that makes me think I would want to come back here first before returning to Milan, Rome, or Palermo.

And if I ever return, I’m going to bring this beauty, Daniel, back with me.