And he couldn’t afford to waste a second of his time there.
It was a cold but sunny Sunday, and even though David had once lived and studied in Florence, he still had to reorient himself to the crooked, narrow streets, lined with ochre buildings several stories high. As a Fulbright scholar, he had walked these streets with a crumpled map, a Eurail pass, and maybe fifty bucks’ worth of lire in his pocket, and he found it strange to be navigating them again now, under such different circumstances. Several times he passed a café that he remembered having lingered in, or a gallery that he recalled visiting. Waiting for some traffic to pass—the Italians, he could see, still drove like madmen—he spotted the blue shutters of the little pensione he had once stayed in.
The Grand it was not.
Crossing the Ponte Vecchio, the old bridge with its ancient jumble of jewelers’ shops and tradesmen’s studios, he stopped to catch his breath and watch the Arno River, rushing below. In the summertime, the river was often reduced to a trickle, but at this time of year it was running high, its greenish water churning wildly under the graceful arches. Of all the city bridges, this had always been the most beautiful, and as a result it was the only one spared in the bombings of the Second World War. Hitler, who had always considered himself a connoisseur of art, had made a visit to Florence in 1938 and taken a special fancy to it. The Luftwaffe had subsequently been given his express orders to keep it safe.
It might be the only thing, David thought, which could ever be said to his credit.
The bridge was busy, but not so crazy as it was in the summertime, when hordes of tourists descended on its many shops. The Florentines themselves were a fairly sober and hardheaded lot, at least by Italian standards, and went about their business immune to the rich history in every corner of their hometown. On many of the older buildings, the Medici insignia—a triangle of colored balls—was still incised in the stone above the doorways, and in the main square of the town—the Piazza della Signoria—a plaque marked the very spot where the mad Dominican priest, Girolamo Savonarola, along with two of his followers, had been burned at the stake in 1498. For a few years, in his quest to purify Florence in the eyes of God, Savonarola had held the city in his grasp, murdering and mutilating his critics, pillaging the homes of the high and mighty, looking for anything of worldly value—from “sacrilegious” art to silver buckles and ivory buttons—to feed the flames of his bonfires … until the city had awakened, as if from a trance, and thrown off his spell with the same barbarity that he had exercised it.
David’s steps took him across the broad expanse of the city square, and toward its most remarkable site—the Loggia dei Lanzi, and its pantheon of statuary known the world over. Here, Cellini’s own masterpiece, the heroic bronze figure of Perseus, held aloft the severed head of the Medusa. Even the sunshine did nothing to detract from the sinister power of Cellini’s sculpture, from its indelible image of the nude warrior, clothed only in helmet and sandals, with his eyes still averted from the deadly visage of his prize, and his feet planted on her corpse. In an especially grim touch, the Gorgon’s blood spurted over the lip of the marble pedestal on which the entire statue was raised. As David approached, he saw a tour guide with a purple iris, the official flower of Florence, stuck in the lapel of her overcoat, leading a group of lackadaisical college students to the base of the Perseus. Several of them were carrying notebooks, and one held out a tiny recorder as she spoke.
“Can anyone tell me,” the guide prompted them, in heavily accented English, “who was this Perseus?” While the students all suddenly dropped their heads and waited, pens poised, David loitered on the fringe of the group. The guide—a slender young woman with black hair pulled back from her face and hastily tied in a ponytail with a thick blue rubber band—took note of him, but she didn’t seem to mind his listening in. Maybe she was glad to have someone who looked interested.
“A king?” one of the girls hazarded.
“That is close,” she said, “that is close. He was the grandson of a king.”
“So that makes him a prince, right?” the girl said, proudly, twirling her pen.
The guide made a wavering motion in the air with one hand. “It is not so simple,” she said. “I will explain.”
And as David hovered in the rear, the guide told the story of Dana?, the most beautiful maiden in all of Greece, who was impregnated by Zeus, the king of the gods. “She lived in a palace, all of bronze, and Zeus came down to her as a shower of gold.”