A Florentine Dream

being an extract from a travel diary



The next morning, we left Rome at the crack of, as usual. But then, I think I must have fallen asleep on the coach, because what I remember is so bizarre, it could only have been a dream.

In this dream, I was running down a corridor made entirely of white marble tombstones. There was no way to avoid stepping on these polished eulogies, even those busts of the owners lined the walls three deep. I ran and ran through a burnished light and hushed stillness, until the slabs beneath me began to change. They grew older, some cracked and weathered, but gained coats of arms and geometric borders. As the dates receded, I realised I was in a lofty church, staring at the tomb of Michelangelo.

"They've made me a saint," the marble bust spoke bitterly. "The saint of nudes!"

"You think that's bad?" returned an effigy of Galileo. "They put my finger, my telescope finger, in a glass case! A reliquary, like it's supposed to heal the ague!"

"The people love when they please," observed a medallion of Machiavelli, "And when they don't, they string you up from the rafters."

"It certainly wasn't our own people who stuck us in these shrines." Michelangelo gazed furiously at all the trappings of the Baroque. "All this scroll work, trimmings like stone is meant to be lace - and yet, how much it weighs!"

It was then I noticed that, behind these memorials which indeed climbed halfway up the walls, a battle was taking place. Flat, angular figures with halos and staring eyes were clawing through the whitewash, wherever a space was left between the marble and acres of darkly glowing canvas. Across these canvases writhed the shapes of vastly unattractive monks, crawling towards Heaven in masochistic bliss. The colours of the older figures were starting to emerge, glorious cinnabar, cobalt, viridian and sienna. Saint after saint seized the instruments of their martyrdom in pierced hands; Virgin after virgin wielded a chubby infant. The Magdalene lashed out with tendrils of her self-grown hair shirt. But the monks used their chiaro scuro and distortions to great advantage. It seemed my gaze became a paint scraper, and where I directed it the baroque encrustations fell away. Then one of the monks shouted, "A medievalist! Into the Armillary Sphere with her!"



All at once, I was splayed and spinning inside a giant globe formed of countless rotating radii, some gilded, some ratcheted mahogany; others inlaid with the signs of the planets and zodiac. All were rotating about the earth, upon which stable point I was forced to run like a bear balancing on a ball at a circus. I feared that at any moment two of the orbits would intersect and I would be crushed: a comet would do it. I cried out to Galileo for help, but the saint of science only gestured, quite rudely, with his mummified finger, and the entire sphere leapt from its lion-footed moorings and rolled thunderously along long, stone corridors and down tower steps, before bursting out into the daylight. Down further steps I rolled, past traditional saints whose features were all melting in the heat. The entire massive church I had exited was formed entirely of gelati, delicately shaded rose and pistachio, with marbled milk chocolate and vanilla wafers. None of which I could eat.

I rolled on down the cobbled street, ringing bells at intervals which even despite the greater distance travelled. The buildings on either side of me were all solid gold, impervious to the surrounding water, and I realised I was crossing the Ponte Vecchio. On and on I spun, until with a rending crash, I smashed through the doors of the Palazzo Pitti and was flung from my Ptolemic prison into the Boboli gardens. The reason was immediately clear, as I gazed on the white statues amongst the greenery, the pink granite of the obelisk. In the presence of so many Greek and Egyptian gods, no mechanistic cosmology could possibly hold sway. I offered thanks to Horus, as the obelisk crawled slowly across the gravel on the backs of four, bronze turtles.

"You should have bought a new hat." I spun round at the familiar voice and saw David - my David, though just a white and finely-chiselled as the other, poised in an avenue of dark cypress.

"You should wear sunscreen," I replied. I reached for the tube I usually carried in my bag, but I was so dizzy, I no longer knew where to find it or anything else. Even walking up stairs seemed an impossible challenge, for the stairs folded into each other in an endless loop and we were simply passing round and round through the same marble decked groves and chambers, only now apparently walking on the ceiling or underside of the same path.

"How about we just go back to the hotel?" David suggested.

"I think my feet have fallen off," I replied. "Let's take a flying machine from the Belvedere."

He shook his giant, curly head. "You never did understand physics."

At this I awoke. The coach was sixty kilometres out of Lucerne.