Florence: Arrival
June 2005
There was a time, not much earlier, when I thought this was impossible. A poor farmboy from Kewaunee County with two kids and a house and no money does not go to Florence. That’s for other people. People with parents who traveled. People who didn’t have to retake algebra to get back into college.
But I’d been obsessed. I watched the PBS series on the Medici twice. I read every book I could get through interlibrary loan — the Brunelleschi biography, the Vasari Lives, anything with plates I could stare at. In my Renaissance art history classes I watched every video, took notes on the notes, built a version of Florence in my head so detailed that when I finally got there I’d already walked the streets a hundred times. My professor, Chris Style, was the one who made it real. She was our guide for the two-month intensive, and her husband, Tony Rajer, was an expert in conservation and restoration who would give us tours and context that went far deeper than any guidebook. Chris believed I should be there. The loans helped me afford it. Between the two, the impossible became a plane ticket.
The money conversion at the airport was my first real hassle. I didn’t have much — I was truly a starving artist for those two months — so every exchange rate stung. Watching the dollars shrink into Euros felt like a preview of the whole trip: everything would cost more than I had, and it would be worth it anyway.
We took the train into the city and walked out near Santa Maria Novella — the cathedral right by the station, massive and marble-striped, just standing there like it had been waiting. And then we were lugging our suitcases over cobblestones, the wheels catching in every crack and gap, sweating in the Italian heat, and I was looking up at buildings that were older than my entire country and thinking — I’m here. I’m actually here. The farmboy who thought he’d never leave Wisconsin is dragging his luggage through Florence.
That first night, Chris brought us all together for a meal near Piazza San Marco. She bought for the whole group. They kept bringing food out — course after course, plates I didn’t have names for — and we drank Chianti and talked and laughed into the night. I don’t remember what we talked about. I remember the feeling. The warmth of the wine and the warm air and the sound of the city outside and the knowledge that tomorrow I would walk into rooms full of things I’d only ever seen in books. I was thirty years old and my real life was starting.
The next morning, our first art stop was the Bargello. Not the Uffizi, not the Accademia — the Bargello. Chris knew what she was doing. She wanted to build up to the David, not lead with it. So we started with Donatello’s David instead — the bronze one, the young one, standing with his foot on Goliath’s head, wearing nothing but boots and a hat. I stood in front of it for a long time. There’s something about seeing a piece you’ve studied in slides and books and then meeting it in person. The scale is always wrong — either bigger or smaller than you imagined. The surface is alive in a way that no photograph captures. I could see the decisions. I could see where his hands had been.
I didn’t know yet that this was the beginning of the most productive art-making period of my life. I just knew the door was open and I was walking through it.