I want to go from the general to the specific, I saw so much while I was living in Florence that it's all too easy for me to succumb to picture selection related anxiety. Therefore, for my first posting I selected landscape photos of Florence that I took when I climbed the three hundred or so stairs to the top of the Duomo (the city's iconic landmark) one morning.
My apartment was located within one minute walking distance from the Duomo, and as the temperature starts to dip in New York, and I become consumed by the academic realm and mundane domestic tasks like laundry and vacuuming, it seems almost impossible to picture it. I have an attachment to all my photos but the one's overlooking the city (although they weren't the first one's I took) are the best introduction to the Italy I became familiar with.
While I was there I traveled to Venice and Rome as well, but Florence is unique in the sheer concentration of artwork found there. Couple that with the fact that one is able to walk anywhere they wish, and you have the makings of a metropolitan paradise. This isn't to say that Firenze is without flaws: the vespas that tear down the street with such rapidity that you see your life flash before your eyes, narrow sidewalks, endless streams of catcalls (although after awhile they become semi endearing), and a pace of life that took at least a full week for this New Yorker to grow accustomed to; but as I mentioned many of these negatives became a part of a life to which I began to like and quickly adapted to. When you add in the fact that I could wake up and take a 5-10 minute walk and see the works of Leonardo, Michelangelo and countless others, near death experiences induced by italian vespa drivers loose all of their importance.
They say photographs are connected to memory, and this one of the Duomo's campanile or bell tower in English, triggers my memory of a sound. Every morning at eight o'clock I could hear the bells ringing in their tower. It became my alarm clock, and my timer. I knew how long I had been studying, sleeping, reading, talking, all without looking at my phone or my watch. There was something different about waking up to the sound of church bells, a difference that I hadn't experienced since I was living in the suburbs Montréal. After a few weeks, I started sleeping right through it, but when I was seated in our small kitchen drinking espresso, I still heard it as if it were across the alley from me. A few mornings ago I could have sworn I heard bells, it seems the town I live in has a church that plays the bells every morning as well, but somehow it doesn't work as much magic on me as the Renaissance era Campanile.
