“Really?” David said intrigued. “What do you write about?”
“What do I write about?” she said, gesturing at the wonders of Florence surrounding them. “The greatest collection of art ever produced in one place, at one time. What other city can claim Michelangelo and Botticelli, Verrocchio and Masaccio, Leonardo and Ghiberti, Brunelleschi and Cellini? They were all here. Their work, it is still here. And I do not even mention yet Petrarch and Boccaccio and the immortal Dante!”
“But you Florentines gave Dante a pretty rough time,” David said with a smile. “Exiling him forever in 1302, as I recall.”
Olivia stopped dead and gave David a more appraising look, as if to acknowledge that this was someone who might know a little something, after all.
“Not my people. My people never had a say in anything. They lived on the Via Guidici.”
In other words, she was telling him that they lived in the Jewish quarter.
“Even Cosimo, who was supposed to be our friend, he closed the Jewish banks in 1570 and forced everyone, whether they liked it or not, to live in that damned ghetto.”
The waiter set a plate and another espresso down in front of Olivia, who lowered her head—the ringlets of her jet-black hair artfully framing her narrow face—and dug in unashamedly.
What amused David about the Florentines—and it was certainly true of Olivia just now—was the way that they spoke of their history almost in the present tense. Olivia dropped the name of Cosimo de’Medici, dead for five hundred years, like he was a personal acquaintance, and as if the removal of the Jews from much of Florence was something that happened just yesterday. In fact, David knew, the Florentine Jews had gradually regained many of their rights, and by 1800 had once again been allowed to live anywhere in the city that they chose. There was even a city ordinance on the books that prohibited malicious references to Jewry from the public stage. The ghetto was gradually eradicated—there was no trace of it remaining—though the undercurrent of anti-Semitism that ran through so much of Europe lingered long after.
An undercurrent that Hitler, in his own time, had brought roiling to the surface.
“Your family survived the war then?” David said hopefully.
Mopping up some yolk with the bread, Olivia said, “A few. Not so many. Many of them, I am told, were sent to Mauthausen.”
A concentration camp where thousands of Italian Jews were gassed.
“I’m sorry,” David said, and she shrugged her shoulders wearily.
“After all this time, what can you say? Many of the Italians, they hid the Jews in convents and cloisters. But the Pope? He did nothing. And the Fascists? They liked their brown shirts and their boots, and they liked killing shopkeepers and clerks; it was easy. But once that was done, so were they. They were cowards at heart.” She scraped the plate for the last of the eggs, as David pictured in his mind’s eye Mussolini hanging by his heels from a meat hook.
“Where do you live now?” David asked.
“You know the Giubbe Rosse, in the Piazza della Repubblica?”
“No, I don’t.”
She shrugged again and said, “It’s the best café in Firenze. I have an apartment next door to it.” Having cleaned every crumb from her plate, she leaned back in the chair and fumbled in her pocket for a pack of cigarettes. She held them out to David, who declined, then lighted one herself.
“But what are you?” Olivia asked. “You are American. But a tourist?”
David wasn’t sure if this was just polite conversation, or if he was being sized up as a potential customer.
“I’m actually here on some business.”
“You do not look like a businessman.”
David decided he’d take that as a compliment. “I’m researching something. I work in Chicago, at a library.”
“I have been to Chicago,” Olivia said triumphantly. “It was very cold. And I also lived in New York, for five years.” She spread her fingers to emphasize the point. “I was writing a dissertation, at Columbia.” She said it like Colombia the country. “Now I work here.”
“On a book?” David asked.
A furtive look crossed the tour guide’s face. “A very big book,” she said. “A history—I cannot tell you more. I have been working on it for seven years.”
“So you must be nearly done?” David said encouragingly.
But Olivia shook her head and exhaled a cloud of smoke over one shoulder. “No. I have met with much resistance. And it will cause a lot of arguments.” Glancing at her watch, she said, “And now I must go. I have a private client for a tour. Where are you staying?”
“The Grand.”
“The Grand?” David could see another reappraisal going on in Olivia’s eyes. “And who is it you work for? What library is this?”
“The Newberry. It’s a private institution.”
“And are you going to work at the university here?”