Wonky Chopsticks

Korean food is not about food. The pleasure of the meal derives entirely from the entire experience. Whenever the food critic AA Gill was asked to recommend restaurants, he advised people to find one and allow it to become your favourite. There is a truth in this which seems to inform the Korean attitude to cooking. The quality of the meal is subordinate to the event of going to eat. Entertainments range from quietly watching TV to ignominiously dragging your friend from the chair they have passed out in. Meals are central to almost all Korean relationships of all kinds and so conviviality is the central element of the meal. When I first arrived I received pitying glances for eating alone and sometimes politely but firmly not allowed in. Attaching ideas to food is like trying to pick up the final glass noodle from the bowl, it cannot be done unless we can picture the food. If I had to choose a dish to epitomise Korean cooking it would be the many forms of Jjigae (stew).

Ordered often, seldom finished it testers on the stove bubbling ferociously upon its stove. Jjigae's primary purpose is aromatic; filled with seafood, beef, onions garlic and obligatory kimchi (the national cabbage) it wafts an amazing smell of vitality. This mass of tastes both retain their individual flavours while having an awesome power to cleanse the sinuses. I am assured that Koreans have over fifty words to describe spicy food,  English is an inadequate tool for capturing the subtly of the sauce which both burns and refreshes. In this steaming volcanic stew, a tentative spoonfall may reveal a mussel or clam which exudes their own delicate tastes. This dish reveals so much about Korean cooking because it is the only way of demonstrating the confusion and clarity that is inherent in her culinary culture. 

Upon ordering any meal you are confronted by such a range of little bowls it is difficult to know what you should eat first. The mass of small dishes make eating at home complex and expensive. You quickly learn that you can combine and mix the dishes in whatever way you choose. The freedom is liberating and exciting and leads to experimentation. Core dishes are called banchan and are complimentary this normally includes spicy kimchi, radish which is ghostly white and crunchy, a small green beans in a soy sauce (Namul) as well as diced chilli and meaty hunks of garlic. A bowl of rice is the staple of all three meals and is delicious when placed on thin slices of seaweed. The combination of which makes the best Korean snack-the Kimbap, a large and more satisfying answer to sushi which does not rely on wasabi to carry it. These side dishes are all very simple components with almost no 'cookery techniques' and would be howled with derision in Masterchef as unambitious. Taste seems to be of more value than technicality. 

Koreans also have the alarming habit of standing up, going to the door paying with a fistful of won and marching you onto another place. This fickleness is totally unnerving to Western shyness but reflects the health and range of Korean food on offer. It is a testament to the relatively recent explosion of prosperity and low-cost rental leases that it is no exaggeration to write that on every street it would be possible to dine out at a different place for every meal for a week. You should be careful as though the claim they want to change style normally from a BBQ to a seafood or other specialist places, convivial Koreans have an alternative motive which I discovered later.. 

The facade of complexity reveals a very simple desire for powerful and wide ranging taste. Yet some of the more seemingly simple ideas are fraught with difficulty. For instance, the glorious BBQ which seers meat much thinner than expected such as tender brisket and gloriously rich beef tongue. You are expected to cook the meat yourself Confucius has saved me and my bacon by allowing older men to cook it for me. It is a huge responsibility cooking the meat ensuring each person gets one piece a time. Having received the meat you are expected to intricately dipped the meat in a seasame oil and salt sauce, wrap the meat in salad having dipped that in a bean seed chilli sauce as well as garlic and chilli in a nampla chilli sauce in about twenty seconds. Luckily this is allowed to be done with hands and rather alarmingly other hands will help shove the exploding wrap into your mouth. The intimacy of eating makes everyone an honorary family member and means much sharing hands and interaction is required. Squeamishness about using one spoon to slurp Jjigae is openly mocked and cannot even be explained by blunt Korean humour. 

The intimacy and stimulation of so many senses creates a powerful sensual experience. One person I met assures me that they will only go to bed with someone depending on how skilfully they can prise pork from the bone of a stew after a night out. This pursuit for fulfilling all senses leads to some terrifying encounters with textures. It is tempting to claim it is the Ying Yang pursuit for hard and soft but some fall out of this category entirely. One of the most delicious street foods I have tried is essentially twisted dough on a kebab stick and dipped in a red bean sauce with has an ambiguous softness both mouth watering and difficult to swallow the sweet but boiling honeyed pancake cum sweet piece demonstrates this. Most alarming, however, is the live baby squid which is such a terrifying prospect my impression was only of relief that my stomach is not an aquarium of floundering (name for squids). The tentacles are an even more formidable prospect unnervingly they writhe off the plate and sucker stick to your face as you eat it. However, the panic striken adrenaline as you chomp is counterbalanced by a firm rubberyness which utterly eclipses its poor, saturated, fried, well-dead cousin Calamari. 

The point of all this eating is not for its own sake. Food is even referred to by Koreans as the chaser for the far more important task- drinking. This might explain the need for such powerful tastes and sensations as inebriation blurs the simple interiors to hazy swirls of laughter and the clattering of chopsticks. Any country where the spirit of choice is cheaper than water has clearly got a passion for drink. It is the medicine of choice the antidote to a lifestyle of total pressure and competition. It is the premier source of all fun and all nightlife from the noraebang (karaoke bar), nightclub or even the jjimjalbang (day-long saunas) to recover resolves around the social lubricant of the city. Fizzy soju and flavoured soju are far too similar to alcopops to be treated seriously but soju is lethally easy to drink either as a shot or mixed with watery lagers. To give an indication as to the importance of inebriation huge clubs of older men and women hike in the mountains in order to sweeten the taste of Makolli which is a rice wine typically drunk from a bowl and like a cat has the unhappy tendency of requiring four legs and nine lives to get home. Presumably these hiking clubs roll down the hill safe in the knowledge they will probably land in an enormous bowl of spicy chicken (dakgalbi). 

Drinking is almost integral to eating and adds an element of chaos to a very structured society. Even this contains customs which complicate the seemingly simple task of obliviating the stresses of work at Hyundai or Samsung. The customs of serving the drinks in order of seniority, complete with bows and two handed holding of the cup. Hyongyim is the magic word, roughly translating as 'elder brother' or 'uncle' it guarantees that when the bill mysteriously appears it is gone in an instant with a benevolent chuckle. I always forget the difficult task of hiding my drink by turning my head contorting as much as a Tantric Buddhist. 

Korean food balances both complexity and simplicity an achievement probably only possible for a people one soju away from bursting into song or tears. A people express themselves through their dishes and the eclectic, powerful, overwhelming and contradictory nature of Korean food serves as the perfect mirror for the madness of Seoul. 

Restoration ethics

1966 means a great deal to many people; to some it involved huge quantities of larger poured down throats hoarse from screaming Bobby and the lads on. To Florentines it conjures memories of a disastrous but somewhat less frequent encounter with a lethal liquid. When the Arno burst its banks it left a scene of devastation and over one hundred people dead. The worst affected area was St Croce, the lowest lying area of the city where its height reached up to 6.7 metres of water. This was primarily a humanitarian disaster, it should not be forgotten, however the flood caused a significant change to the Italian states' perception and therefore treatment of art. 

For a long time the masterpieces of former ages had become divorced from the heritage of the nation, they had morphed into a relic of the past. Hung up, lit up and gawped up at, art no longer helps to formulate the nations' psyche. In response to this loss of meaning art has become sacralised and revered but from a distance. The crisis of 1966 led to an example of this enduring attitude to art. Cimabue's crucifix was displayed in the refectory of the Museo dell' Opera of St Croce. Flood water reached up to the top of Christ's nimbus. A work of extraordinary beauty was, in places, stripped of paint and rendered as if the Son of God had suffered a terrible skin condition, St. John the Evangelist was neckless and the Blessed Mother had had disastrous plastic surgery. 

This was one of the first great tests for restorers. Restoration of priceless art in Italy has had a patchy history. There is a special place in the Art Historian's hell for the Restorers of the 19th Century, next to Savonarola and just to the left of the Council of Trent. Oils and waxes they relied on collect dust and darken over time. These confident moustachioed men have provided decades of work for the 'Laboratario del Restauro' now called the Opficio delle Pietre, the leading Restoration laboratory in Florence. The ODP has applied with the dogmatic zeal of the newly converted, one principle. The name of which gives the name to this articles unpromising title: Restoration Ethics. They believe that precious art must be maintained in its original state at all costs. This attitude has two elements when applied to painting rather than sculpture. The first, is the positive attitude to reduce the layers of varnish acquired over the years the original colours capture a stunning delicacy. Unfortunately this effect is tainting by the huge swathes of the fresco missing, normally from porous walls, occasionally theft of paint pigments. These gaps both natural and artificial are preserved by the rigidity of restorers' approach. The case of Cimabue's crucifix demonstrates the limitations of this attitude. 

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/Cimabue_021.jpg.  (Pre-restoration) 

The OPD endeavoured to restore the crucifix using a technique known as Chromatic Abstraction. They use the base colours of the composition in a pointillist style to fill the gaps of damaged frescoes. Chromatic Abstraction is as ugly as it sounds. An artistic slight of hand which deceives a casual glance but on closer inspection becomes hideously obvious. This is a self-conscious decision to be modern, by painting these epilepsy inducing dots in watercolour future generations will be able to wash it off if they choose to. Cimabue's crucifix has been attacked with such vigour by amateur Singer Sargents that they have had to hang it in the sacristy far from the public's attention where it looms above head height so that no one can see it properly. 

Restoration ethics demand both a reverence for the original work and a consciously modern approach to restore it. Under such immense strains of logic it is no wonder it collapses into the rushing floodwaters below. Restorers are in a position of immense privilege which their counter parts of two hundred years ago could not have dreamt of. The laboratories are funded by the state and receive sponsorship from some of the biggest companies in Italy. Arteria, the European logistics company spent over 10,000 euros on the most recent Crucifix restoration, the Ognissanti Crucifix by Giotto. They are given no deadline and the Cimabue project lasted ten years. 

Most significantly of all are the technological advances... technological advances - the catch all phrase to hide behind when ignorant of every single detail of said 'advance'. But I didn't spend a decade of my life studying Restoration, so there! It does seem obvious that our ability to project images gives an enormous opportunity to Restoration projects. If we are able to X-Ray the fresco layers to the Sinopia we have access to the preliminary drawings of the artist. Any Art Historian can demonstrate the colour scheme and the techniques are well understood. Why not be honest and paint in the fresco? 

Immidiately a raw of indignation erupts from the scientists clad in laboratory suits. Ranting about destroying the authenticity of the painting. Celebrating something because it is old seems profoundly arbitrary and contrary to any artistic aspiration. 

This idea is not without precedence, we know that Raphael frequently used Classical sculpture parts in his works- whole heads and torsos! Art is a state of constant evolution, it seems self indulgent to leave great gaping holes in art. Would Giotto appreciate that his Bardi Chapel in Santa Croce have huge chunks missing in the name of posterity? We have the ability to recreate beautiful art so why not? The facade of Santa Croce is no less beautiful once we learn it is the epitome of the gothic revival of the 19th century (the moustaches may have known what they were doing all along). Walter Pater, the critic argued that art is "simply for the moment". Current attitudes towards art strikes the immediacy of art and renders it lifeless on the wall. Restoration has become a contradictory and ugly solution that satisfies no one. 

To the Italians of 1966 the Cimabue Crucifix came to symbolise the plight of the entire city. Just as Cimabue's art united the city in his own time, as depicted by Frederic Leighton, the destruction and resurrection of the cross united the country. Art once again became 'of the moment'. This great opportunity was squandered and became a science and blind devotion to the facile nonsense of artistic integrity. The more complete and therefore accessible the greater power art has to unite a nation. Widespread sales of Pants depicting poor David's minuscule member are an absolute testament to this. 

Tethered Monkeys

When we consider the role of women in the Florentine Renaissance there is a general consensus among historians that they were excluded from the public sphere. A predominant theme of confinement to the hearth and altar runs throughout the biographies of wealthy women in the period. We can find evidence to support this in the geography of the houses they were 'imprisoned' in. The Palazzo Davanzati is one of the last fully furnished houses of the period. The loggia, which creates a division through all four floors demarcates the space for both genders. The large and spacious rooms are complete with desks and was where business was conducted and was therefore a male only area. While at the back of the house are the bedrooms, cluttered and frescoed and where women and children would while away the day. Natalie Thomas in 'A Social History of Renaissance Florence' argues that in the case of patrician families it was a matter of protecting the virtuous chastity of the women as an asset essential to the securing of dowries and alliances through marriage. I would add to this that the violent factionalism and the desire to create communities of allied families was at least a contributing factor. However, when we read the literature or art of the trecento and the following centuries it is striking how prominent a role women play for a group as excluded as they are. Two extremely different celebrations of feminine attributes can be witnessed in both the Cult of Madonna and in Bocaccio's portrayal of women in the 'Decameron'. 

The proliferation of images depicting the Virgin Mary is extraordinary; wrapped in her Lappis Lazuli mantle she gazes down on you from the walls of every church and gallery. The Queen of heaven appears in several traditional forms but the one that reveals most about Florentine attitudes to women is that of Madonna and Child. The Orthodox churches created the template of Madonna and Child. A tiny but fully developed Christ stands blessing  on his mother's lap who looks more totem pole than human. The greater development of naturalism of Cimabue, Giotto and Duccio transformed this classic depiction. The most startling change is how they portrayed Christ. The transcendent majesty of Christ is morphed into the incarnate, a baby clutching at his mother. The serenity of the Orthodox image is turned into a vulnerable comment about the fragility of faith. It also elevates Mary from the foreground to a central protagonist. In so doing the relationship between a mother and her child is sacralised. It could be highlighted that Madonna represents the masculine Florentine's ideal, a virgin yet a provider of male heirs. Yet this does not successfully explain how in an age of very high infant mortality how essential the relationship between mothers and their children were. It might explain why women were encouraged to stay in the domestic realm. It does not excuse the Florentine attitude but equally it might give us an insight which from our contemporary standards might otherwise influence our perception. 

On the other hand,  others have emphasised the liberalism and promiscuity rampant between men and women during the period. In Bocaccio's 'Decameron' two of the ten days dedicated to story telling recount tales of the comedy of gender relations. P.Stewart introduces the concept of 'beffe' as a central theme of Bocaccio's novellas. 'Beffe' is the art of trickery and scandal, often the women and men are portrayed as wily Oddysseuses as they skillfuly manipulate their lovers and spouses. Reminiscent of the Wife of Bath women are shown at total intellectual parity with men by asserting their feminity. 

The second story on day seven is told by Filostrate whose protagonist is a woman named Personella. She and her aristocratic lover are interrupted by her tradesman husband. After hiding her lover in the barrel she procedes to humiliate her husband who has come home early to sell a barrel. She then manipulates her husband into cleaning the barrel while she returns to the bedroom with her lover. She concludes by selling the barrel to her lover at a greater price thus utterly humiliating her simple husband! Though fiction, this story shows that women could be influential and far from the passive role commonly assigned to them by posterity. Bocaccio's humorous tales assert the role of women even in its structure, each day the story 'queen' dictates the theme and merits of each tale. He even satirises misogynistic attitudes one of the more stupid men proclaims that men have a "God-given superiority over women". 

We should be cautious of these presentations of women; depicted and written by men and almost always paid for by men. Though we know that Bocaccio was a bestseller and Florentine women had some of the highest literacy rates in Europe. We also know that women attended church and in some cases were liberated by the church. Despite the many stories of women tragically sent to converts we also have stories of a more Boccaccio-esque tendency. For instance, Charles FitzRoy recounts how many women advertised their beauty by emphasising their piety such as praying loquaciously and seductively receiving mass. This paradox by subverting piety as exemplified by the Madonna demonstrates the methods in which women tried to create soft influence in Renaissance Florence.

 It is difficult to capture the vast range of experience for women of the period. However, there is one custom which seems to symbolise the many aspects of the experience. In the Brancacci chapel in Masolino's fresco of the 'Healing of the Cripple and Raising of Tabitha' there is a mysterious shape on the yellow house in the centre foreground. On closer inspection it is a monkey walking along a bar directly under the windows in which women frequently gazed out from. Women kept monkeys, presumably procured by their husbands while trading abroad, who lived on bars where others used to hang bird cages. The monkey is such an interesting choice for a pet. It symbolises the exotic, beautiful and alien, the 'other' which women ultimately were in terms of political power. Mischievous and naughty it is an animal imbued with the spirit of beffe but like all pets fiercely loyal to its owner. The combination of both virtues women were expected to display. The monkey seems to encapsulate women of the Renaissance. Ultimately the monkey was chained, stuck to its home and its obligations to dutifully serve and entertain. 

Ai Weiwei in the Palazzo Strozzi

Ai Weiwei has finally left town. One hundred and fifty thousand visitors have stepped into the Palazzo Strozzi's courtyard to see (according to his own posters) one of the world's most famous contemporary artist's exhibition, entitled 'Libero'. Retrospectives are expected to be self-indulgent. However, the sheer laziness and complacency displayed represented the worst in mainstream art. Weiwei's grandiose self-proclamations of 'the concept' of the installation showed such little respect for the space and historical significance of the building, it bordered comedy. Mr Weiwei sought to explore the relationship between "tradition and modernity" and where better to do that than in the cradle of Western art? If only he had even fleetingly considered to attempt this or even better had explored the tensions between Eastern and Western artistic traditions. We could have witnessed a truly fascinating exhibition. Yet besides from being a breathtakingly innovative artist he is also a martyr, a victim of totalitarian censorship. He now invites you to join the movement and witness his rebellious acts of free speech for a fee. I am in no way mocking his incarceration or underplaying the agony he must have endured but his arbitrary comparison missed a wonderful opportunity to show both the power and limitations of art. 

This leads us to the decision to hold the installation in the Palazzo Strozzi, commissioned by Filippo Strozzi in 1491. His life began tragically, his father Matteo Strozzi's political and familial ties led him to be banished by the Medici family. After his fathers death, Filippo was left alone in Palermo at the age of thirteen. So far the political victim parallel rings true. However, as R.A. Goldthwaite highlights Filipo's extraordinarily Palazzo was not a political gesture but a "public display of private status". Filippo served as little time in political office as could be expected of a leading guild figure and had worked closely with Lorenzo de' Medici, even providing him with a loan. Rather than becoming a symbol of victim-hood, the Palazzo Strozzi should be held up as a monument to mankinds irrepressible will-power to flourish. From a bereaved exile he was able to return to his home and establish his family to prominence and status through this building. While Weiwei feels righteous enough to pose on the beach as the drowned Syrian refugee boy, called Alan Kurdi, Filippo had a conflicted sense of morality. He commissioned the breathtaking family chapel at St Maria Novella, its frescoed walls utilise images from 'The Divine Comedy'- in the iciest depths of hell are those guilty of the sin of usury, an occupational hazard in the banking industry! Thus we see that Filippo Strozzi was not a righteous and confident dissident as Weiwei seeks to portray himself, he was it seems, a complex and undemonstrative creator, a builder. 

The exhibitions attempt to delve into the relationship between "tradition and modernity" went as far as to drop tradition, literally. The three images of Weiwei dropping the Han dynasty vases has to be one of the most sickening images from the art world. A tragic inversion of his 'teacher' Marcel Duchamp's aim to create beauty from the domestic, Weiwei destroyed the exceptional to indulge the domestic. Strozzi commissioned as his chief stonemason a man called Cronaca primarily because he had studied in Rome and was familiar with classical design. In case Weiwei had forgotten the Renaissance was based entirely on a desire to preserve and recreate the cultural flowering of Europe in antiquity. This failure of modernity to respect the dignity of the past was encapsulated by his portraits of 'fellow' rebels. Machiavelli; the man who wrote the manual on how to be a tyrant, Dante, who wrote 'De Monarchia' proposing a Universal Monarchy which sounds awfully similar to the United Front of the People's Republic of China. The only one he shares a similarity with is Savanorola, the austere monk who also liked destroying priceless artwork. This embarrassing attempt to modernize the past in the medium of lego bricks. An infantile idea made with a children's toy. Using historical techniques and mediums to depict contemporary objects were more successful, the marble CCTV guarding the door and the jade hand-cuffs both had an aesthetic and political impact. The irony of using semi-permanent mediums to items you hope will be abolished did not seem to inform his art. Weiwei's caution to really challenge and provoke the Renaissance and pompous western artistic traditions was frustrating, apart from an ornate Rococo wallpaper set with twitter logos and surveillance cameras. For such a 'provocative' artist he did little to illuminate any challenge on Western art. 

Thought-provoking, challenging and political are all words you are expected to exclaim solemnly as you leap onto your white charger and race to the nearest social media site to post some protest you signed about saving something, anything! How political can art be? It's a question this article is not equipped to answer. Yet after visiting Libero one suspects not really. Looking at art has to be one of the most passive acts a person can do. Weiwei is at times revealing and what he reveals is indeed shocking. For instance the 'Snake Bag' on the walls made from school children's backpacks who died in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake is harrowing and horrific, as is Weiwei's accusation that local government corruption led to vulnerable school constructions. But this does not mean that a single person who entered the gallery will leave knowing what they can do to reform Chinese building legislation. He can be defended as providing an international conscience but Thomastic 'Conscientia' involved both acknowledging right and wrong and then acting upon it. Art should act as a mirror to the conscience; making one feel impotent and useless to solve the world's ills would be fine if everyone didn't leave feeling so damn smug about visiting it in the first place!

There were moments when Weiwei did achieve success. His installation on the outside side of the Palazzo hung with lifeboats similar to those used by migrants and refugees crossing the Mediterranean mimicked the form of Renaissance arches. The rusticated stones looked like violent waves under the boats. Strozzi would have admired those who move away from home in order to save the home, he would have recognised himself. The final room contained a section of the Shanghai studio ordered to be torn down by the authorities. It was a fitting final ending, in Filippo Strozzi's will he ordered that the family never lose the house and they did not until the 20th century. The pace of modernity outstripped tradition, time should be respected not glamourised. I wish that Ai Weiwei remembered that.

Trial by tripe

Henry I died an unusual death, he ate too many Lamprey eels.  His death precipitated 'The Anarchy', the Civil War between Stephen and Mathilda. It caused so much destruction that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle lamented that it was as if "Christ and his Saints slept". This Christian coma has had far deeper repercussions than a grubby chapter of British history; it created a monster. The parasitic lamprey (Henry liked his stewed in white wine) is translated into Italian as 'Lampreda'. This should have been a clue. Confucius's real golden rule states: do not masticate, digest, devour, feed or dine on anything named after a king-killing regicidal river monster. 

In India, bovines are worshipped as a manifestation of the Hindu deities, in Japan, Wagyu cattle are massaged and bathed daily but in Tuscany, cows are consumed entirely and utterly.  No one is sure what cows did to warrant such cruel treatment. Maybe Lorenzo the Magnificent stood in a cow pat? Maybe it's because only pig bladders can be inflated to make a Calcio ball? Regardless of the reason it has left Florence with spots as dark as the Black Death that blight the armpits of the city. They sit there innocently simmering away on the corner of almost every major piazza waiting to strike.The Lampredotto vans serve a 'local, traditional Florentine dish' - I think all Florentines are forced to a communal oath, an act of offal double-think denying all existence of Lampredotto or they are too busy eating fresh pasta to notice. 

The cruelty, treachery and sheer heartlessness of the vendor that  nonchalantly and with not a raised eyebrow in sight accepted my order will live with me forever. With a flourish of sadistic pride and like an Inquisitor revealing his instruments of torture, he opened his cauldron. Flabbiness is an underrated word. It has the faint onomatopoeia of a fat person farting as they attempt to stand up, it even looks glutinous with the rotund 'b' letters smugly in the centre, yet it doesn't have an associated smell. A good case could be made for the smell of sweat on public transport. However, the smell that wafts from the pot is at its warmest, wettest and most gloriously flabby. 

Cows eat so much grass that they have to have four stomachs to digest the pulp. The fourth stomach, the bag of eels, is the Lampredotto. Presumably there's a Heston Blumenthal  busily experimenting on revolutionary ways of serving the third stomach. It's boiled in a thin stock of vegetables and it's own vile juices. The mass of wetness is sliced and the toasted panini bread is submerged in the juices. An oily salsa verde thinly drips on the drowned monks habit of meat.

Dante's inferno never quite captures the terror of anticipation for the Condemned, if he had, it would describe the feeling as with trembling hands you survey satan's favourite sandwich. They say that as you drown you experience a moment of utter airless hedonistic bliss. The first mouthful feels like relief, the bread and sauce seem to cover the taste. Euphoria pours through you - I will survive you exclaim as you reach for your second bite... 

Too late. It's over. The warm thickness collapses on the back of your tongue and a sense of primal self-loathing seeps into every fibre of your being. No amount of Chianti could prevent the inevitable. Sprinting to the nearest bin any hope of elegance is finished. Shame lingers just less than the residual aftertaste.

For just four euros you to can enjoy the worlds greatest gastronomical disaster. 

First Encounters

In Diana Athill's 'Florence Diaries' over a third of the (admittedly slim) journal details her painstaking journey by trains across the continent.The triumph of arrival and glamour of the destination is enhanced by the pilgrimage. The immediacy of flying leaves one hurled into the surroundings. Whereas, the gentle submersion that 1940s travellers must have experienced, as they travelled through post war Italian countryside, which judging from the pervading sense of decay has changed very little since. It must have allowed them to prepare for the assault on the senses. I am very conscious that every cobbled inch of Florence is dripping with ink from awestruck travellers! No sooner had the  15:23 double decker train pulled into Santa Maria Novella stazione one is left grasping for cliches, leaning on hyperboles for support pleased to stumble over any stereotype that might seem vaguely Italian. 

You can imagine my delight in being held up by the interminable road besides the flat to see a flying corps of Italian Vespa cyclists leaving a Versuvian cloud of ash. However, as you walk further and further into the heart of the city you realise that the 'authentic Italian' from the designer sunglasses to the immaculate healed shoe has been exported the world over. They are easily ridiculed but a Chinese tourist party provides the best example of how an Italian 'should' look in the whole of Italy. 

As we wandered over the city in the first few days we two insidious sentiments argue amongst each other- a weird sense of familiarity but also a wistful sadness that you could live here for decades and never penetrate all the secrets of Florence.