Florence: Running the Old City
Summer 2005
Florence is a hilly city. I learned this with my lungs.
I ran most every day that summer, and the hills made sure I earned every block. The streets climb away from the river in every direction — cobblestone switchbacks, stone staircases wedged between buildings, long grinding slopes up to churches that medieval architects apparently placed as high as possible on purpose. I’d start along the Arno where it was flat and then turn uphill and immediately regret it. Huffing and puffing through neighborhoods where old women watched me from their windows like I was insane, which I probably was. A sweating American in running shoes grinding up a 500-year-old street at seven in the morning.
But running was how I saw everything. The other students mostly stayed near the school, near the cafes, near shade. They complained about the heat, hung out in the same piazzas, went to the same restaurants. I understood — it was hot, genuinely hot, the kind of heat that makes you want to sit still and drink water. But I hadn’t crossed an ocean to sit still. I was on a mission. I wanted every inch of the old city, every neighborhood, every alley and courtyard and dead end. I think I was the only student who actually went and found it all. That annoyed me about them, honestly — they were in Florence and they were bored.
One day my roommate Dan — a student from Madison — and I ran all the way to Fiesole, the hilltop town above the city. Chris had brought us there for dinner earlier in the trip, and I’d loved the ruins and the views, so Dan and I decided to run it. The road climbs for miles. By the time we reached the top my legs were finished and my lungs were burning and the whole city was spread out below us like a painting. We stood there catching our breath and looking down at the terra cotta rooftops and the dome of the Duomo and I thought — I know this place now. Not from books. From my feet.
The stairs at San Miniato al Monte became my favorite punishment. The church sits high above the city on the south side of the Arno, and the staircase up is long and steep and beautiful. I ran those stairs over and over. At the top I’d stop and draw — the view from up there is one of the best in Florence, the whole city visible from river to hills. I spent a lot of time at that church. It’s Romanesque, older and simpler than the Gothic and Renaissance buildings downtown, and something about its plainness felt right after a day of sensory overload. I’d sketch the facade, sketch the view, sketch the cemetery nearby, and then run back down the stairs and across the river to the studio.
I was probably in the best shape of my life that summer. The hills, the running, the stairs. The food helped too — I ate well because the food was real. Simple pasta, tomatoes that tasted like tomatoes, bread with olive oil, espresso in the morning. I didn’t have money for much, but what I ate was honest. I also drank a lot of Chianti, which probably canceled out some of the running, but that’s how it works.
Not everything was virtuous. One night the students got together for a session of debauchery — a fellow student staged a kind of last supper, a photography project with archetypes and vices. Everyone participated. It was weird and fun and a little unhinged, the kind of thing that happens when you put a group of art students in a foreign city for two months and let the pressure build. We weren’t monks. We were thirty-year-olds and twenty-year-olds a long way from home with cheap wine and big ideas.
But the mornings were mine. The city was mine before it got hot, before the tourists filled the streets, before the other students woke up. I’d lace my shoes and step out into the cool air and run, and the cobblestones would jar my knees and the hills would burn my calves and I’d turn a corner and see something I’d never seen before — a doorway, a fountain, a cat sleeping on a ledge above an alley — and I’d file it away. Another piece of the map. Another inch of the old city, earned the hard way.