Following the pattern of Genoa, the Italians have created a kind of unmistakably Mediterranean city. They are all the same: a network of the narrowest streets formed by tall tenements, with dark entranceways and windows with shutters that rise up like eyelids. From the street you can see a strip of blue sky despairing between two parallel roofs. A system of ropes helps to hang out the clothes between one window and the next, lo straccio. Rags of every color and shape often blot out the view of the sky. This narrowness creates a concentrated, bustling style of life: it’s simply impossible to describe the lively scenes you encounter on these streets. It’s as if people don’t really know where they live, they all seem to belong to the same house. People bicker from window to window and sometimes you hear epic arguments. Down below, those who are coming and going must take care not to bump into a cot, tread on a child or a dog’s tail that’s splayed over a doorstep. Now and then, suddenly and quite simultaneously, children start bawling, dogs bark, cats miaow, women tear their hair out, men brawl, and girls scream. A hellish din is unleashed that lasts until the carabinieri arrive, then everybody dives into their den and only orange peel dots the street. While the carabinieri are about there is a dull, subterranean hum; people mumble and mutter behind their doors and behind every window two livid eyes follow the shadows from the tails of the carabinieris’ coats. However, this ferment almost always dies down one way or other. People emerge from their hiding-places as quiet as can be, dogs and cats shush, children laugh, women comb their hair in the window and men sit on the doorstep reading Avanti! When peace is restored, you see baskets descend, touching the wall, tied to a rope used to hoist them up or down from the flats. Sometimes the girl pulling the rope, between a carnation and a fiasco of red wine, tugs too brusquely and the basket leaps and twists like a scalded cat and macarrone is scattered over the ground to general lamentations. If you pass by an hour later, people are still sighing.
Mentone was once a town with this kind of street life. Today it has become too elegant for that hustle and bustle to survive in the old town. The old carcass remains, but preserved, like a relic. Quiet reigns on the narrow streets and it’s difficult to see a basket lowered from a window by rope. The warm charm of life in Mentone gives it a nineteenth-century air. One feels the shade of Garibaldi, with mustache, squib, and red shirt should emerge from the dark stairways.
If you ever go to Mentone, look for the Place de la Tête, go up the street of the Loggette — partly covered by arches — continue along the very narrow Rue Longue, where you’ll find the ancient palace of the princes of Monaco. If you don’t want to walk so far, take the slope up to the church of Saint-Michel, refurbished in Jesuit style. By the church, look for the path hewn out of the rock that leads to the town’s old cemetery, located in one of its highest points. The cemetery is like a kind of amphitheater on four levels, one above the other, and one per religion. You will enjoy wonderful vistas before you and a great expanse of sea; the Italian coast on the left, and the French south-facing coast on the right, covered in olives and pine trees and gardens. Your blue-filled eyes will follow the flight of a seagull or pigeon. You will see the wind gently gyrate the weathervane on the belfry. And if you smoke, you can sit on a half worn gravestone and smoke a cigarette.
Memories of Florence
Florence was one of the first cities I got to know in the course of my wandering. I lived there a good long time and in excellent company. Some of my friends were staying at the Pensione Balestri on Piazza Mentana on the Lung’Arno. Best friend of all was Lluís Llimona, younger than me, but as lively, sensitive, and intelligent as he is now.
Llimona introduced me to a strange character: a short, abrupt, olive-skinned Mexican painter with thick, frizzy hair who had fought in the civil war with the renowned Pancho Villa; once the revolution was victorious he was given a grant to travel to Europe to study what they call Arte in Latin America. The Mexican had lingered in bohemian, literary cafés across the continent and had now wound up in Florence by virtue of amorous pressure exerted by an imposing northern lady straight out of German mythology — plump and pink with glowing, rippling flesh like a Rubens. Conversely, he was small, bilious, and swarthy with purple lips and greenish teeth.
Another great friend of ours also stayed in the pensione (although only briefly), Ràfols the architect, who is one of the most inspired, serene men I have ever known. He depended on a meager grant he received — always late — from the Council for Further Study. Despite his extreme poverty, Ràfols never strayed from the routine of his daily life. He went to mass every day, wrote a daily letter to his close friend Enric C. Ricart, and had his personal beggar to whom he never failed to give a set amount day in day out — even in his direst impecunious moments.
I’m convinced Ràfols has always had a personal beggar, but something occurred with his Florentine beggar that became celebrated in the city’s intellectual circles and was so amusing it travelled the world. People still recount the anecdote though it dates back to 1921.
One early evening the architect left the church of Santa Croce and made for the band of beggars who had cornered the church’s front steps, to give the usual alms to his beggar. Ràfols was taken aback; he looked everywhere but the beggar was nowhere to be seen. Worried he might have suffered an upset, he spoke to a woman who belonged to the beggarly band and asked whether she knew what had happened to the absentee, namely, his beggar.
“Il cieco sta bene, taro commendatore …” replied the woman in a rather sarcastic, tipsy tone. “Il cieco sta benissimo, ma é uscito colla sua signora e sone andati al cinematografo.”
I hardly need add that, Llimona and Ràfols, like the Mexican and I, became wiser rather than richer in Florence, if I am candid. Our debates in the various cafés we visited and our endless conversations as we strolled along the prestigious banks of the Arno, were of an abundance and quality in inverse proportion to our meager fare. Our table was always bare, but our ideas and hopes had never flowed so effortlessly, boldly, or beautifully as they did then. We wouldn’t have been at all surprised to read in the newspaper one day that our Mexican painter had been appointed a minister or general in his country, because that man’s eagle eye justified the most optimistic of hypotheses. Nor would it have seemed at all peculiar if Lluís Llimona had made a fortune in commerce or painting, because his gifts as a painter were as evident as his talents as an entrepreneur. Nor that J.F. Ràfols, without shedding the luminous, palpable aura of grace that made him lighter than air, might have finally ended up having not one beggar in his charge but a whole army, for we’ve known greener fruit to ripen. None of that would be odd, but perfectly natural and possible. What would be odd, my beloved distant friends, would be for the scintillating ideas we floated on Florentine nights to resurface, for our ingenuousness to return or the pleasure with which we could stroll for an hour to read a text by Dante or a paragraph from Vasari on a stone house façade, or the enthusiasm that led us to one church after another, every day at any hour, even if we never attended mass. All that has gone never to return, however many years go by.