Piazza Dei Duomo: Tuesday, 11:30 PM

lorence is a strange city—part saint, part whore; the sacred rubs shoulders with the profane; the profoundly spiritual coexists with the irredeemably secular. As I sit here drinking in both the Florentine night and the beer I smuggled out of the hotel, I'm assailed by these contradictions:

To my left, the ornate, inutterably gorgeous façade of the Doumo—so chock full of sculpture, art, and architectural flourishes that I'm sure I could spend all of my time here describing its beauty and still not come close to capturing its essence.

Directly in front of me, the stolid, almost plain skin of the Battisteri, a building famous only for its doors (and even those are now copies), yet still an impressive sight thanks to its sheer historical weight.

Adding counterpoint to these famous landmarks and the hallmarks of Florentine life is a whirlwind of sense impressions: scruffy portraitists begging passing tourists to stop and have their likeness caricatured; guitar players strumming by (one of them playing, incongruously, "La Bamba"); voices conversing in every conceivable language; the annoying buzz of the onmipresent scooters (I call them the Jet-Skis of Florence's streets); garbage trucks and buses making their appointed rounds; the pungent smell of horse dung from the endless stream of tourist-laden horse-drawn carriages.

Ah, Florence! I feel like a guilty John who, after securing the services of an old and tired whore, wants only to talk and discover her inner beauty. Why is there no way to bypass the tawdriness? Why must people of good will and good intentions have to jostle and compete with mere gawkers and rubberneckers?

The answer isn't too hard to find. This dilemma, after all, is merely an extension of the more general battle between the thoughtful and the superficial. The solution is to realize that the sacred's permanence is easily enough to trounce the impermanence of the profane. Knowing this, it becomes easy to ignore the distractions of Florence and focus on its enduring attractions. How satisfying it feels to know that the spiritual heaviness of the Duomo will ensure that it outlasts the pipsqueak weight of the surrounding souvenir shops, change vendors, and gelaterias.

Florentine Notebook	In the Uffizi	Postcard #1

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