“The thing about walking in Florence,” said dad, “is that everyone is
trying to kill you.”
He was explaining this latest theory while darting out from between two parked
cars on a narrow, but busy street, oblivious to the speeding, oncoming delivery
van 15 metres away.
He continued: “The other day, I had a motorcyclist driving behind me across the
pedestrian crossing.” This might explain why, right now, he was ignoring the
zebra crossing several metres away in favour of crossing on a tight, blind
corner, up a hill.

He took out his map to check where we were going. Where were we, and
where were we going?
We were currently positioned in the middle of a crossroad of narrow laneways –
as in, definitely not on the footpath, but on the road, and with motorcycles
zooming around us.
The question was, which intersection? Eschewing Google for way-finding, dad favoured the tourist map he’d found at the AirBnb, which was fine if you were looking for a Michelangelo or a McDonalds, but not much else.
Like Boswell and Byron before him, dad was on the latest version of his own ‘Grand Tour’ of Renaissance art and history. Given his inability to map-read, which found him lost at every (wrong) turn, his was more like a ‘Grand Detour’.
But like a 20-year-old backpacker in Thailand, it can be good to travel in order to lose yourself, and find yourself, occasionally.

This time dad was spending several weeks immersed in Neo-Classicism and Romanticism at the British Institute of Florence, attending a series of lectures and guided museum visits. Seeking cultural balm for my soul, and some son-father time, I was happily tagging along.
The library of the British Institute, one floor up a stately building between
the Carraia and Santa Trinita bridges on the south side of the Arno river, has
a collection of books as old and musty as its collection of eccentric British
gentlemen.
Killing the 10 minutes before the first lecture, dad and I sat in the well-worn
club lounges, when an elderly former professor launched a conversation about the
recently convicted child sex abuser Cardinal George Pell with his neighbour.

“There is an argument,” he proferred, in a plummy Oxbridge dialect, “that
some children, do act in a way that is, provocative?” He phrased his statement
like a question.
“I went to a public school, and I just, you never just, you know, it just
couldn’t have happened in those types of environments,” he continued, adding by
way of evidence, that he had not seen anything first hand.
“Well you know what the number
one cause of pedophilia is?” I responded, in broad Australian.
He looked my way.
“Sexy kids.”
A smirk crossed the lips of the other elderly gentleman, who was studiously
reading the London Review of Books, and doing his best not to listen in. At this
point, dad jumped in with, “Some would also say that English public schools are
the greatest form of child abuse.”
There’s no better way to bond than by schooling a pedophile-apologist with a lesson
in Enlightenment. With that class now finished, we picked up our belongings and
headed into the lecture.
What else to do in Florence?
When not in the classroom, we ate, drank, shopped and sight-saw.
Observations of the trip in these regards include:

Medici Gelateria
opposite the Statuto tramway. You can go (almost) direct from the airport to
eating a brioche stuffed with three flavours of gelati within 30 minutes.
Eataly: a runaway success
of a supermarket showcasing the best of Italian regional produce, with an okay
restaurant within. Though, if we are to stick the puns, the state of the
toilets was a bit ‘Shitaly’.
Rinascente has always
been a poor man’s department store, but now there’s finally something worth
buying. They recently opened a rooftop terrace, and its stunning view over Piazza della Repubblica can
be purchased for the price of (an only slightly over-priced) coffee.


The Piazza della Repubblica itself is
currently being dug up for renewal. Its famous arch has an inscription that
reads:
L’ANTICO CENTRO DELLA CITTÀ DA SECOLARE SQUALLORE A VITA NUOVA
RESTITUITO (The ancient centre of the city / restored from age-old squalor / to
new life).
This sentiment is better expressed in today’s language by the opening of an
Apple Store beneath it.
For those without a budget for first-hand luxury, Florence also has amazing
vintage stores, where many designers from name brands find inspiration for
their next collections.
One such is Vintage Epoca, where the
stylish, elderly storekeeper engaged me in discussion about the state of the
world.
“We’re in a World War at the moment, but it’s an economic one,” he said. “And
people don’t even know about it.”
I was shopping for a third-hand suit in a back-street of Florence. For the
record, I know all about it.