Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
so that you constantly had to step in the road to get past them. You don't so much walk around Florence as
pick your way among the obstacles. Everything seemed dusty and in need of a wash. The trattorias were
crowded and dear and often unfriendly, especially in the city centre. Nobody seemed to love the city. Even
rich people dropped litter without qualm. The buildings around the Duomo seemed to grow progressively
dustier and shabbier each time I walked past them.
Why is it that the cities people most want to see are the ones that so often do the least to make it
agreeable to do so? Why can't the Florentines see that it would be in their own interest to sweep up the litter
and put out some benches and force the gypsies to stop being so persistent in their panhandling and spend
more on brightening the place up? Florence has more treasures than any city in the world - twenty-one
palaces, fifty-five historic churches, eight galleries, twenty museums - more than the whole of Spain,
according to a UNESCO report, and yet the annual restoration budget for the entire city is less than οΎ£5
million. (The Archaeological Museum alone has 10,000 pieces still awaiting cleaning from the great flood of
1966.) It's no wonder so much of it looks unloved.
Where neglect doesn't come into play, incompetence and corruption often do. In 1986, the long-
overdue decision was taken to restore the cobbles of the Piazza della Signoria. The ancient stones were
dug up and taken away for cleaning. When they were returned they looked brand new. They were brand
new. The originals, or so it was alleged, had been taken away and sold for a fortune and could now be found
as driveways to rich people's houses.
It was the gypsies who got to me the most. They sit along almost every street calling out to passers-by,
with heart-breakingly filthy children of three and four stuck on their laps, made to sit there for hour after hour
just to heighten the pathos. It's inhuman, as scandalous as forcing the children to work in a sweatshop, and
yet the carabinieri, who strut through the streets in groups of three and four looking smart and lethal in their
uniforms, pay them not the slightest notice.
The only gypsy I didn't mind, curiously enough, was the little girl who picked my pockets as I was
leaving the city. The kid was magic. It was a Sunday morning, brilliantly sunny. I had just checked out of the
hotel and was heading for the station to catch a train to Milan. As I reached the street opposite, three
children carrying wrinkled day-old newspapers approached trying to sell them to me. I waved them away.
One of them, a jabbering and unwashed girl of about eight, was unusually persistent and pressed the paper
on me to such an extent that I stopped and warned her off with a firm voice and a finger in her face and she
slunk off abashed. I walked on, with the cocksure strut of a guy who knows how to handle himself on the
street, and ten feet later knew without even feeling my pockets that something was missing. I looked down
and the inside breast pocket of my jacket was unzipped and gaping emptily. The kid had managed in the
time it had taken me to give her a five-second lecture on street etiquette to reach into my jacket, unzip the
pocket, dip a hand inside, withdraw two folders of traveller's cheques and pocket them. I wasn't angry. I was
impressed. I couldn't have been more impressed if I'd found myself standing in my underwear. I took
inventory of my rucksack and other pockets, but nothing else had been disturbed. It hardly needed to be.
The girl, who of course was now nowhere to be seen - she was probably at that moment sitting down to a
feast of truffles and Armagnac with her seventy-four nearest relatives at a campground somewhere in the
hills - had got $1,500 worth of traveller's cheques, not bad for five seconds' work.
I went to the police office at the railway station, but the policeman there, sitting with his feet evidently
nailed to the desk, did not want his Sunday morning disturbed and indicated that I should go to the
Questura, the central police office. It never entered his mind to go out and try to find the little culprits. Only
with reluctance did he write down the address on a scrap of paper I provided for him.
Outside I climbed into a cab and told the driver where to take me. 'Peekpockets?' he said, looking at
me in the rear-view mirror as we whizzed through the streets. This Questura run was obviously part of his
Sunday-morning routine.
'Yes,' I said, a bit sheepishly.
'Geepsies,' he added with disgust and made a spitting sound, and that was the end of our
conversation.
I presented myself at the guard-room of the Questura and was directed upstairs to a waiting-room, a
bare cell with grey, flaking walls and a high ceiling. There were three others ahead of me. Occasionally, a
