Flamenco In Florence

On the 11th September I caught the train to Florence from Assisi and found a decent little place to stay on via Faenze.

Florence is spectacular: the flower of Italy, I think. It is as though people are still in the 1960s: girls ride bikes and have long, flowing hair; guys smoke the old style cigarettes; people are interested in the arts, languages and humanities; musicians play in the squares. There is even one corner in Piazza della Repubblica that seems reserved for young female opera singers to perform in. And it sounds just splendid.

Against this is a backdrop of beautiful architecture and ancient stones and statues which still seem to breathe the spirit of the Renaissance in which human creativity reached a rare peak in history.

Some historians have observed that the Renaissance was triggered by the rediscovery of Plato’s works in Europe. This is not at all unthinkable as Plato’s discussions of the nature of the beautiful, the true and the good are very inspiring and really different from Aristotle’s academic and dry attempts to systematise some of Plato’s passing observations.

The Italian Renaissance boasts names such as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Giotto. The Renaissance paved the way for and inspired the birth of modern science as we know it, with names such as Kepler, Copernicus, Pascal, Galileo, Newton and Leibniz, which in its turn paved the way for the modern technological revolution and further scientific advances with the advent of Einstein, Planck, Bohr and so on.

Florence still breathes the spirit in which it all began, as I say, but Florence remains untainted by the sterility and the constrictions which modern technology and industry have imposed on our lives. So Florence occupies a kind of midpoint in the history of human development, I felt. It inherits something of the wisdom of the ancient Greek master of philosophy, it retains a significant number of the treasures and artefacts of the flowering of human creativity witnessed in the Renaissance, and to some extent it still resists the style and the influences of modern Western society.

I saw, among others, one young lady who walked around with a permanent smile on her face one sunny, balmy afternoon—so enraptured she was with the spirit of Florence.

I felt as though I could stay in Florence for a good twelve months and just soak up its beauty while studying its history and language and spending time writing, but other places were beckoning me on, and soon I was to move on to visit Milan and several places in France and Monaco.

And what about the ‘Flamenco’? you might ask. One afternoon there was a guy playing Flamenco in the same piazza, and it sounded just great. He looked like an Englishman who had lived in Spain for many years and was now touring the continent! Well, that’s my guess, anyway, but you can never be sure in Europe. I'm sure there have been so many mixed marriages over the centuries as many Europeans look the same to me!

To see and hear him playing the guitar click on "Flamenco In Florence" in the right hand column.

Leba