Florence is fed up. Fed up with me, with you, with everyone. So much so that she has launched an institutional campaign with the following title. “Florence is alive, treat her with kindness.” We saw it in the shop window of La Rinascente, where we always go in, and it spills across the city, which with a population of 400,000 is one of the most visited in the world: from January to October 2025 it recorded 9.7 million overnight stays. Maybe you were one of the people who slept there. Or maybe not, perhaps because you didn’t want to, because its intensity overwhelmed you. The Ministry of Tourism has deemed it necessary to specify that the city is not just an open-air museum, but an ecosystem that revolves around the people who live and work there.
We don’t want to harm a city that has given us so much: the viewpoints, the Giotto’s freestanding Christ figures, the Acqua di Rose and the Acqua di Maggio from Santa Maria Novella, Oriana Fallaci, Faliero Sarti scarves, Brunelleschi’s follies. Ferragamo, Pucci and Gucci. The most sustainable journey, theory says, is the one that isn’t undertaken, but that isn’t going to happen. Florence is like being inside the art history books we study, one of those places that reconnects us with humanity’s capacity to create beauty. It is possible to travel there carefully, sit on a terrace in Oltrarno without being a nuisance to the neighbors, enjoy its churches without bothering the faithful, eat well supporting Florentine businesses, and, moreover, derive great pleasure from it. By taking care of the places, we take care of ourselves, and perhaps well-being is that, not a massage in a spa. Although how we love massages, madonna.
Florence attracts and deters, deters and attracts. It attracts with its concentration of artworks, the feeling of being where so many stood. It draws you to glimpse Michelangelo’s The Annunciation, a painting in which silence is audible, the resilience of local commerce, both old and new, the haberdashers like Quercioli & Lucherini, who have been selling stockings since 1895, dunking cantucci in vin santo. The ashlar blocks that clad the Palazzo Strozzi, the love of craftsmanship, and the aroma of coffee from Todo Modo all lure you. It deters strolling along the Ponte Vecchio, the crowds that swarm before the Duomo (but not the Duomo itself), the masses before Botticelli’s Primavera (but not Botticelli himself). It deters because we have been, and sometimes are, these people who bother other people.
This is not a trip on tiptoes, but a restrained journey, full of “noes.” It is built with what you decide not to see as much as with what you decide to see. It is a Florence for those who don’t like Florence; I know who you are, you are reading me and I can understand you. Florence, like all that matters and like the rest of Italy, drives us crazy, but that makes it unforgettable. We too drive it and its inhabitants crazy with our desire to see the Uffizi in one morning. What a madness that is.
