A Story of Florence

Has there ever been a book that you saw in a bookstore which called to you; where the cover and title swept you away to another time and place? You stop, gaze at the cover, walk away from it, feel compelled to come back to it, pick it up, feel the soft paper in your fingers, flip through the pages smelling it, gaze at the cover again, but then for some reason place it back on the display? From time to time, you return to this bookstore to daydream about owning it; most of all to daydream about where it would take you. Perhaps dreaming felt forbidden to you, or by reading it, you risked opening yourself up to false hope for something unattainable. Perhaps your life simply did not have time for it. Whatever the reason, you kept saying maybe next time to this book.

I don’t remember the day I finally bought it. I don’t remember much of the circumstances around that book afterwards. Where it sat when I wasn’t reading it. Where I sat when I was. I only remember the sense of wonder as I read it. A world opened up to me with each sentence. It was short. 167 pages. When I reached the end of it, reality sunk in. It was like a holiday coming to an end; a holiday I had briefly lived in early 15th century Florence.

The book was Brunelleschi’s Dome by Ross King.

This book kicked off a period in my life of voracious reading in the mid-2000’s. I didn’t have a television back then. My entertainment was reading, fueled by the wonderful set of stores in the Houston area called Half Price Books. Almost every weekend, I would do the circuit of these book stores. Thanks to the Ross King book, Florence and the Renaissance was one of my favorite subjects at the time. I read another book about the Brunelleschi story called The Feud that Sparked the Renaissance by Paul Robert Walker. There was also April Blood: Florence and the Plot Against the Medici by Lauro Martines, Il Gigante by Anton Gil about Michelangelo’s David, Sprezzatura: 50 Ways Italian Genius Shaped the World, Young Michelangelo, Michelangelo’s Mountain, Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling, and Fortune is a River to name a few more. At the time, I was enamored with the Renaissance more than any other time period, and Florence was at the center.

Skip ahead to July 2015. I finally fulfilled a dream which never could have been foreseen when I was reading Brunelleschi’s Dome back in 2004. I climbed the dome with my daughter, who was fifteen at the time. The details of the book which awed me back then came to life in front of me; the herringbone pattern of bricks Brunelleschi used to build the dome without any internal support and the dome-within-a dome construction which permitted the same thing. This was revolutionary architecture. And this was 1420-1436.

On the same trip, we also saw Michelangelo’s David and, like most tourists, we evaded the eyes of the security guards to capture a photo, which are not allowed.

July 2015 marked the third and final time I had been to Florence. As I explored Europe as voraciously as I used to read about it, places like Switzerland turned my focus away from the Renaissance towards spending my holidays in the outdoors hiking rather than in museums. Florence and Italy fell through the proverbial cracks for almost a decade.

I became a blogger in 2016 where Florence remained on the periphery with all the other legacy experiences that I had before I started to write about them. This year, I decided it was time to pay homage to the book that contributed as much to my love of Europe and wanderlust as any Rick Steves guidebook. It was time to revisit the city of Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, and the Medici.

Over the next few posts, I will go back to Florence where I spent a few days back in June on the trail of the maestro Brunelleschi and Florence’s low profile beer culture. It felt in a way like a homecoming, of seeing someone you once loved after many years have passed. She hasn’t changed much. On the other hand, I can assure you that today I am a bit more gray than I was on the top of Brunelleschi’s Dome in 2015.