awaiting collection. Paolo seized the phone and reminded the man that it was because of his company’s inefficiency that my case had ended up in Singapore. The case was delivered to the hotel later that afternoon.
It was thanks to Vanni, who was to become an expert in Medieval French and Italian literature, and Paolo, an art historian, that I saw so many marvellous paintings, frescoes and sculptures during that first stay. They were the most informative, the most lucid, of guides. It was Vanni who introduced me to that remarkable hillside church, San Miniato al Monte, with its quasi-oriental decorations on the inlaid pavement in the nave and on the walls of the monks’ choir. The mosaics of various beasts and of the signs of the zodiac reached Florence from Byzantium at the time of the Crusades.
One unforgettable September morning Paolo took me to see the frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine. So dark was it in the chapel that coins had to be fed constantly into a machine to ensure a few moments of light in which to gawp at the marvels before us. The paintings by Masolini and Lippi are graceful and exquisitely composed, but those by Masaccio are on an altogether more exalted plane. The apostles in
Tribute Money
have a sculptured gravity and seem to be in possession of a rich inner life. Masolino’s
Temptation
of Adam and Eve is beautiful enough, but the couple in Masaccio’s
Expulsion from the Garden
on the opposite wall are human beings racked with unendurable pain and grief. They are raw in their misery. In 1968, Adam’s genitals were hidden behind a fig leaf some prude had painted on in the eighteenth century. After the detailed and precise work of restoration of the frescoes that was financed by the Olivetti corporation throughout the 1980s, Adam’s cock and balls are visible at last. The
Expulsion
is one of the greatest artistic manifestations of the perils in store for suffering humanity. Masaccio (Tommaso di Ser Giovanni) was a working-class boy.
Accio
is a suffix meaning rude, rough or dirty. Perhaps this colossal genius, who died at the age of twenty-six, merited the sobriquet ‘rough trade’.
Vanni and Paolo came from very different backgrounds. Vanni, whose nose resembled that of Federigo da Montefeltro, Count of Urbino, in the portrait by Piero della Francesca in the Uffizi, came from artisan stock, whilst Paolo could boast that he was born into one of Siena’s oldest aristocratic families. (There is a vault in the Duomo bearing the family name.) Everyone remarked that Paolo’s way of speaking was
raffinato
. It certainly sounded posher, to my untrained ears, than the other voices I was listening to, with their Florentine habit of converting a hard ‘c’ into an ‘h’ of the Spanish kind. (‘Coca-Cola’ becomes, almost, ‘hoha-hola’.) Paolo’s vowels and consonants had none of these local impurities.
Some evenings we would meet for a drink in Florence’s one openly gay bar, which was cast in the form of an English pub called the George and Dragon. A blond American, much sought after by the more obvious queens, pretended not to notice the surrounding campery as he served beer and spirits. He may have been an innocent, that farmer’s son from Wisconsin, working his way through Europe. He looked at the swishing and mincing young Italians imperviously, neither smiling nor frowning at their antics. By this time, Vanni, Paolo and I were talking an idiotic cod Italian. We invented newly discovered operas –
Emilia di Wisconsin
by Donizetti and
La pudenda abbandonata
by Cimarosa – and ludicrous verbs such as
swishare
and
minciare
. As Vanni and I were leaving the unlikely pub one evening, Paolo entered with an American girl he was teaching Italian and the history of art. Inspired by a glass too many, I greeted him with the question ‘
Hai swishato stasera
?’ (‘Have you swished this evening?’) The eager New Yorker, keen to learn the language as best she
It was thanks to Vanni, who was to become an expert in Medieval French and Italian literature, and Paolo, an art historian, that I saw so many marvellous paintings, frescoes and sculptures during that first stay. They were the most informative, the most lucid, of guides. It was Vanni who introduced me to that remarkable hillside church, San Miniato al Monte, with its quasi-oriental decorations on the inlaid pavement in the nave and on the walls of the monks’ choir. The mosaics of various beasts and of the signs of the zodiac reached Florence from Byzantium at the time of the Crusades.
One unforgettable September morning Paolo took me to see the frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine. So dark was it in the chapel that coins had to be fed constantly into a machine to ensure a few moments of light in which to gawp at the marvels before us. The paintings by Masolini and Lippi are graceful and exquisitely composed, but those by Masaccio are on an altogether more exalted plane. The apostles in
Tribute Money
have a sculptured gravity and seem to be in possession of a rich inner life. Masolino’s
Temptation
of Adam and Eve is beautiful enough, but the couple in Masaccio’s
Expulsion from the Garden
on the opposite wall are human beings racked with unendurable pain and grief. They are raw in their misery. In 1968, Adam’s genitals were hidden behind a fig leaf some prude had painted on in the eighteenth century. After the detailed and precise work of restoration of the frescoes that was financed by the Olivetti corporation throughout the 1980s, Adam’s cock and balls are visible at last. The
Expulsion
is one of the greatest artistic manifestations of the perils in store for suffering humanity. Masaccio (Tommaso di Ser Giovanni) was a working-class boy.
Accio
is a suffix meaning rude, rough or dirty. Perhaps this colossal genius, who died at the age of twenty-six, merited the sobriquet ‘rough trade’.
Vanni and Paolo came from very different backgrounds. Vanni, whose nose resembled that of Federigo da Montefeltro, Count of Urbino, in the portrait by Piero della Francesca in the Uffizi, came from artisan stock, whilst Paolo could boast that he was born into one of Siena’s oldest aristocratic families. (There is a vault in the Duomo bearing the family name.) Everyone remarked that Paolo’s way of speaking was
raffinato
. It certainly sounded posher, to my untrained ears, than the other voices I was listening to, with their Florentine habit of converting a hard ‘c’ into an ‘h’ of the Spanish kind. (‘Coca-Cola’ becomes, almost, ‘hoha-hola’.) Paolo’s vowels and consonants had none of these local impurities.
Some evenings we would meet for a drink in Florence’s one openly gay bar, which was cast in the form of an English pub called the George and Dragon. A blond American, much sought after by the more obvious queens, pretended not to notice the surrounding campery as he served beer and spirits. He may have been an innocent, that farmer’s son from Wisconsin, working his way through Europe. He looked at the swishing and mincing young Italians imperviously, neither smiling nor frowning at their antics. By this time, Vanni, Paolo and I were talking an idiotic cod Italian. We invented newly discovered operas –
Emilia di Wisconsin
by Donizetti and
La pudenda abbandonata
by Cimarosa – and ludicrous verbs such as
swishare
and
minciare
. As Vanni and I were leaving the unlikely pub one evening, Paolo entered with an American girl he was teaching Italian and the history of art. Inspired by a glass too many, I greeted him with the question ‘
Hai swishato stasera
?’ (‘Have you swished this evening?’) The eager New Yorker, keen to learn the language as best she
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