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called Junior and Chip. I always imagined myself striding through the crowd, firing the gun at selected
targets and shouting, 'Make way, please! Culling!' I felt a little like that now.
There were hundreds of Japanese - not just the traditional busloads of middle-aged camera-toters but
also students and young couples and backpackers. They were at least as numerous as the Americans, and
the Americans were everywhere, plus hordes of Germans and Australians and Scandinavians, and Dutch
and British and on and on. You wonder how many people one city can absorb.
Here's an interesting statistic for you: in 1951, the year I was born, there were seven million
international airline passengers in the world. Nowadays that many people fly to Hawaii every year. The more
popular tourist places of Europe routinely receive numbers of visitors that dwarf their own populations. In
Florence, the annual ratio of tourists to locals is 14:1. How can any place preserve any kind of independent
life when it is so manifestly overwhelmed? It can't. It's as simple as that.
It is of course hypocritical to rail against tourists when you are one yourself, but none the less you can't
escape the fact that mass tourism is ruining the very things it wants to celebrate. And it can only get worse
as the Japanese and other rich Asians become bolder travellers. When you add in the tens of millions of
eastern Europeans who are free at last to go where they want, we could be looking back on the last thirty
years as a golden age of travel, God help us all.
Nowhere is the decline in quality in Florence more vivid than on the Ponte Vecchio, the shop-lined
bridge across the Arno. Twenty years ago the Ponte Vecchio was home to silversmiths and artisan
jewellers and it was quiet enough, even in August, to take a picture of a friend (or in my case a picture of
Stephen Katz) sitting on the bridge rail. Now it's like the stowage deck of the Lusitania just after
somebody's said, 'Say, is that a torpedo?' It was covered with Senegalese immigrants selling semi-crappy
items of jewellery and replica Louis Vuitton luggage spread out on blankets or pieces of black velvet. And
the crowds of tourists pushing among them were unbelievable. It took me half an hour to bull my way
through, and I didn't try again for the rest of the week. Far easier, I concluded, to make a quarter-mile detour
to the Ponte di Santa Trinita, the next bridge down-river, and cross from there.
The city fathers of Florence could do a great deal more to ease the pressures - like allow museums to
be open for more than a couple of hours a day, so that everybody doesn't have to go at once. I went to the
Uffizi now and had to stand in line for forty minutes and then had to shuffle around amid crowds of people
straining to see the paintings. Several rooms were roped off and darkened. Again, surely, they could spread
the crowds around by opening more rooms and showing more paintings. In 1900 the Uffizi had 2,395
paintings on display. Today it shows just 500. The others are locked away, almost never seen.
Still, few galleries are more worth the frustration. The Uffizi must have more perfect paintings than any
other gallery on the planet - not just Tintorettos and Botticellis, but the most sumptuous and arresting works
by people quite unknown to me, like Gentile da Fabriano and Simone Martini. It struck me as odd that the
former pair could be so much more famous than the latter. Then again, a hundred years from now it could
easily be the other way around. Old masters come and go. Did you know, for instance, that Piero della
Francesca was all but unknown a century ago? It seems to me impossible to look at his portraits of the
Duke of Urbino and not see them instantly as masterpieces, but Ruskin in all his writings mentioned him
only once in passing, and Walter Pater mentioned him not at all, and the bible of the nineteenth-century art
world, Heinrich Wolfflin's Classic Art, appears to be unaware of his existence. It wasn't until 1951, with a
study by Kenneth Clark, that people really began to appreciate him again. The same was true of
Caravaggio and Botticelli, whose works spent much of two centuries tucked away in attics, quite unloved.
Caravaggio's 'Bacchus' was found in an Uffizi store-room in 1916.
* * *
I spent four days wandering around Florence, trying to love it, but mostly failing. The famous view of the
rooftops from the Boboli Gardens - the one that graces a thousand postcards - was splendid and
entrancing, and I liked the long walks along the Arno, but mostly it was disappointing. Even when I made
allowance for the hordes of tourists, I couldn't help feeling that much of it was tawdrier than any city this
beautiful and historic and lavishly subsidized by visitors like me had any right to be. There was litter
everywhere and gypsy beggars constantly importuning and Senegalese street vendors cluttering every
sidewalk with their sunglasses and Louis Vuitton luggage, and cars parked half on the narrow pavements
 
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