Florence, Italy: Missed Opportunities
Arnaud at the top of the Palazzo Vecchio tower, with Il Duomo in the background. Florence, Italy. October 16, 2019.
We had friends headed to Italy for a midautumn vacation, so we coordinated to meet them in Florence. Arnaud had never seen the city—or Italy at all, quite frankly—and I hadn’t returned to Florence since I did some academic work on Italian Renaissance intellectual history there many years ago.
Much like every place, Florence has layers upon layers of history. Though we don’t know a lot of the layers for many—if not most—places, we do know quite a bit about the layers of Florentine history.
We know the Roman emperor Julius founded it. We know it fueled a rebirth of arts and culture that ushered in what we now call the Renaissance. We know it featured the first republic in Europe since the Roman republic. We know it fostered Dante, Machiavelli, Michelangelo, da Vinci and countless other great thinkers and creators. Also, we know it fomented fierce theological debate, provoked upheaval in the Catholic church, and simmered the first upheavals of the protestant reformation. (Hello, Savonarola.) And we know the Florentine republic fell, as they tend to do, to dictators (in this case, the de Medici family).
And I could go on.
I focus mainly on briefly delineating Florentine history ahead of the fall its republic because, for reasons unfathomable to me, everything Florence exposed us to as tourists on this trip focused in on one small, thin layer of the city’s astoundingly amazing history: The story of the city at the advent of and during the reign of Cosimo de Medici, its first post-Renaissance dictator.
In my opinion, Cosimo de Medici and the decline of Florentine glory during and after his reign comprise one of the eras of Florence’s history with minor interest.
I’ll grant that not everyone wants to hear or see history tied to figures about which they’ve never heard tell—or, if they do, they need to get it peppered in among other, more “famous” folk, to keep their interest. (I see this issue as similar to the challenges well-known musicians with deep catalogs have when it comes to concerts: No one wants to hear the new stuff.)
I’ll probably stand as the only person in any general tourist group in Florence who’ll get nerded out by a guide going into depth about Francesco Petrarca. I get it.
However, I do firmly believe that a critical mass of people exist who have heard of Machiavelli, Dante, Botticelli, da Vinci, Michelangelo, and the rest. Even if only through a childhood filled with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and an adulthood reading bad business books that completely miss Machiavelli’s point. (Sigh.)
And yet: We took three guided tours and visited seven museums and historical sites. And every single one of them focused its story mainly on Cosimo de Medici.
Granted, we had only four days. Granted, we mainly did the easily available and main-circuit tourist options, rather than hunting around for off-the-beaten-path activities or guides who could cater to our specific interests. However, that we approached Florence in this way gives me a feel for what most people who visit Florence—people who may not have as much historical context for the city and its layers as I do and who wouldn’t know to ask for anything other than what the main sightseeing opportunities offer them—gets from the tourism machine in Florence.
They get very little, in my opinion. What a terrible, shameful, tragic missed opportunity.
Maybe people do go to Florence for Cosimo de Medici. Maybe they don’t know anything about Dante and Machiavelli.
Maybe people go to Florence just to check it off their lists of “famous” European cities. Maybe they don’t care to learn too much, really. Maybe, if they learn anything at all, they consider it icing on the cake of the set of photos they took to share on social media.
Maybe Florence has so many crowds of tourists—after all, we visited in the “off” season of mid-October and the main tourist areas still had teeming, bustling crushes of people—that the city can only manage to offer a limited number of activities, lest the entire town get too congested and too many wires get crossed and too many tourists get too confused and overwhelmed. Maybe Florence has designed its myopic tourist activities to contain the crowds, limit their fields of vision, and reduce mass paralysis.
I don’t know. Yet it made me sad. Florence has so much to offer—and people get so little of it.
And it makes me wonder about places I’ve visited that have similarly deep histories—histories I didn’t know well enough to know what I missed when the opportunities I took circumscribed my vision. How do I work harder to see deeper in my travels and in my life?
