A Florence Diary by Diana Athill

Author:Diana Athill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc.
Published: 2016-10-20T19:27:25+00:00

I’ve lost my precious phrase book, so we aren’t much good at sustained conversations, though I find myself surprisingly quick at understanding what they say to me, if it’s simple.

Now, having written this diary so far, I must go to bed. The smell of stephanotis is rather drowsy-making.

THURSDAY, 28 AUGUST 1947

We left the Hotel Bonciani this morning, in a shower of gold. From our enormous popularity at the end, we deduce that we must, as usual, have over-tipped like mad. It is so difficult to know where you are with lire, what with half a dozen different rates of exchange, and even the ‘official’ one being artificial. Also the Italians haven’t yet caught up with the depreciation of their money, just as we haven’t. Half a crown to us still seems quite big, although the Americans, seeing it from outside, know it’s only about sixpence. And in the same way 500 lire seems a lot to the average Italian, though it works out at only about three shillings to us.

We brought our things down to the pensione in one of the more decrepit cabs, with a very sad horse. Most of them are rather good nowadays. Remembering stories of how Italians treat animals, I was spying about for atrocities but most of the cabmen I see are busily engaged in giving their horses drinks out of miniature buckets, or bathing their hooves, or whisking flies off them.

Then the hotel rang up to say we had left some things. As Pen had already dropped everything five times, and had had to bob upstairs twice to collect things she’d forgotten and then been chased to the cab by a chambermaid clasping two side combs and all her French money, I said, ‘Pen! You can jolly well go back by yourself and fetch them,’ and flounced off across the river on my own. So it was rather mortifying to discover at lunchtime that although she had indeed left her canvases, she had been handed by the hall-porter, in addition to them, a very squalid suspender belt and a pair of dirty pants of mine.

I walked through the rather slummy part, where workmen sit in the doorways busily carpentering genuine antiques – very well too – to a church called Santa Maria del Carmine, which has a chapel with lovely frescoes by Lippi, Masolino and Masaccio, and stayed there until it was shut up at twelve.

We went again after lunch, so that Pen could see them, but it was still shut, so we walked down to the old wall and sat on the bank watching a very nice ferry which seems to be run for the sole entertainment of the ferryman and half a dozen little boys. They pull it back and forth on a wire, fishing the while with rapt devotion, some of them with Heath Robinson multiple rods, and apparently for the purest love of the sport as there is never any sign of anyone catching anything. There was an old man with a cobalt blue hat with long feathers in it, selling them something out of gourds.

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