FIREnze

I first visited Florence in 2002, half a lifetime ago. In 2019, I managed to return, again in the heat of a hazy August when the cafes and streets bristle with braying bravados, spilling noisily into the arteries and veins of this City of Lilies. Florence is culture, it is memory, it is rebirth. The sight of a fiery sunset from the Piazzale Michelangelo brings to life Mark Twain’s famous “tides of color” passage, but John Ruskin summed it up best: You will begin to wonder that human daring ever achieved anything so magnificent.