Tag: florence

My Pink Pages

“I don’t understand people who don’t read La Gazzetta dello Sport. Men, at least: I don’t understand them. I just don’t get it.”

— Sandro Veronesi, writer


It didn’t take me long to fall in love with Italy. It took me a little longer to fall in love with football. You’d probably find it hard to believe if you met me today, but in 1988 I was quite indifferent about The Beautiful Game. That was the year I first visited il bel paese (I’d been to Sardinia five years earlier but that doesn’t count, as any Sardinian will tell you). Strolling with my parents through the streets of Florence, Rome and Venice, I was too preoccupied with gelato or the Colosseum or whether to blow all my lire on a die-cast scale model of a Ferrari 308 GTB to notice that I’d stumbled into soccer’s spiritual home. My only football-related memory of that summer is the replica shirts on display at market stalls outside the Uffizi, and being drawn to the azure blue of Napoli — not due to Maradona, but because the team’s jersey was emblazoned with the logo of my favourite chocolate bar.

I was lucky enough to return to Italy the following year, and the year after that, and the one after that, until the question as to where we’d spend our summer holidays was no longer asked. Meanwhile somewhere along the way a light-switch had been flicked and by the time the 1990 World Cup had started I was a borderline soccer obsessive. I don’t know how it happened. The transformation came almost overnight, like magic.

My family had made several Italian friends, and they all loved indulging me in conversations about Gary Lineker or Totò Schillaci. Some friends of ours had a house near the coast of northern Tuscany, not far from Massa-La Spezia. On our way back from the beach we’d often stop for a late afternoon drink at Bar Sport, a dusty little café located between a fork in the road and a railroad crossing. It was operated by a woman and her daughter, and was the kind of place where old men sat and drank aperitivi while kids in flip-flops played videogames in the back. It was here one sultry afternoon that I first came across a newspaper called La Gazzetta dello Sport. I probably first picked it up because it was printed on pale pink paper, something I considered to be most unusual. Once unfolded it covered the entire table, forcing others to lift up their drinks. Most interesting to me however, was that it appeared to be devoted solely to football.

Of course, as its name confirms la Gazzetta is technically a sports daily, but anyone who’s been to Italy knows that sport means 90% football and 10% everything else. That’s how it was for me too. I immediately became fascinated by this alluring and exotic publication, a pink-and-black window into the culture of calcio. It became my portal into a world – Italy, football, Italian football. I already knew I wanted it, and had now been presented with a chance to get to know it better.

Suddenly my visits to Bar Sport became less about liquid refreshment and more about whether or not Sampdoria were really going to sell Gianluca Vialli. My Italian at the time being limited to the usual first words (ciao, grazie, margherita, gelato), I was initially drawn not to the speculative articles but to the daily double-page spread highlighting the goings-on in Serie A’s summer transfer campaign. This section featured a complex table which detailed the players each team had already bought and sold, who they were still hoping to buy, and what the probable starting line-ups would be come the start of the new season.

Soon my first task upon entering a bar, any bar, was to scan for la Gazzetta, which usually lurked folded on the counter or at an empty table. At this point I still didn’t have the money or language skills to justify purchasing the paper for myself, and when the bar’s copy remained occupied I’d sit and fidget impatiently without touching my glass of acqua minerale. But quickly, out of a sheer desire to understand, I picked up the meanings of several words and began to grasp phrases in Italian, albeit most of them football terms and sporting jargon: acquisti, cessioni, trattative, probabile formazione…

Obviously, Italy in the summer is great for lounging poolside but as any Inter fan knows the game isn’t played under the ombrellone. La Gazzetta takes on much greater relevance once the season has begun and there’s some actual football to talk about. Monday’s issue traditionally sells the most copies, since it contains all the reportage and post-mortem of the weekend’s games. My Dad used to travel to Italy for work once or twice a year, and he began bringing Monday’s Gazzetta home for me. This is when I first became aware of le pagelle, the paper’s individual reviews and votes for each player’s performance after each match. According to common pagelle thought, a six is considered sufficiente. Several players have received a nine, but not even Platini, Maradona or Van Basten ever scored a perfect ten.

* * *

In 1992 the British terrestrial network Channel 4 began televising live Serie A matches, a decision which initially coincided with the transfer of English stars Paul Gascoigne, David Platt and Des Walker to Italian clubs. The show quickly transcended these players’ activities however and stuck around long after their Italian adventures had ended. A new legion of Italian soccer fans in the UK were rapidly converted by what was at the time universally considered “the best league in the world”. Particularly popular was the Saturday morning highlights show Gazzetta Football Italia whose host, the peerless James Richardson, would present an irreverent and informed perusal through the week’s football papers from an elegant piazza somewhere in Italy. When I wasn’t hatching a plan to steal Richardson’s job, I was delighted to have a slice of the Italian life I yearned for beamed into my living room.

My family returned to Serriciolo, the town where I’d first picked up la Gazzetta, during the World Cup of 1994. The day we drove down through Switzerland Italy were playing Spain in the quarter-final. I remember because the man in the tollbooth was watching the match on a portable TV and told us the latest score as we exited the autostrada (“Uno-zero, Dino Baggio”). We watched an inspired Italian team dispose of Bulgaria in the semi-final at Bar Sport, where for the final against Romario’s Brazil they moved the TV outside into the car park and set up rows of seats for locals to come and watch. I sat wearing my blue Italy shirt holding a tricolore flag on a stick which I’d bought six years earlier in Siena. I felt a strong connection to the Azzurri — after all, the country had played as much a part in my football life as anywhere else. When Roberto Baggio’s penalty sailed over the bar into the southern California sky those feelings grew even deeper. Women and children were in tears, and powerless ragazzi began hurling plastic and wooden chairs over the fence and onto the train tracks out of sheer frustration. The next morning la Gazzetta had sold out at the local newspaper shop, so the woman who ran the bar gave me her copy as a souvenir. It was stapled, and the front page read “Poker Brasile”.

After high school I began studying Italian at university, and a couple of years later I embarked on a study abroad program in the northern Italian town of Pavia. I moved in with another student named Federico who as luck would have it was a fellow soccer nut, and an avid Milan fan. After our first weekend in the apartment together, he turned to me over breakfast. “It’s Monday,” he said. “Which means there’s something very important you have to do this morning.” “What’s that?” I asked, imagining some typically Italian bureaucratic nightmare I was unaware of, with long queues and unhelpful clerks. Federico’s eyes widened. “Buy la Gazzetta!”

I was delighted to have found a like mind with whom to share my passion for calcio, which had now become a full-blown obsession and a personal area of encyclopedic expertise. In Pavia I’d leave the house each morning with 3,000 lire: 1,500 for la Gazzetta and 1,500 for a coffee at the bar. I’d then come home and read the paper cover to cover at the kitchen table until lunchtime, when Federico and I would eat spaghetti or tortellini and discuss the day’s big stories.

Sometimes we’d even buy Corriere dello Sport, the Rome-based rival to Milan’s Gazzetta. Italy actually has three sports dailies, although I considered Turin’s Tuttosport shameless in both its outlandish front page stories and clear bias towards Juventus. By now I had become fiercely loyal to la Gazzetta, or “la Rosea” as Federico sometimes called it. Both Tuttosport and Corriere are printed on plain off-white newspaper, and neither could entice me as la Gazzetta first had all those years ago.

I spent most weekends in Milan, either shopping or attending a game at San Siro, where la Gazzetta served as both half-time entertainment and a handy seat cushion. Whether on the train or at the stadium I soon realised that carrying la Gazzetta in Italy provided me with a sort of camouflage, a quick and easy prop for instantly fitting in. Just as I’d always been able to identify Italian paninari in London by their 501s and Invicta rucksacks, surely no-one would peg me as a tourist with la Gazzetta tucked under my arm.

Now fluent in Italian, I returned to Cambridge where I was able to continue reading la Gazzetta on a daily basis. Happily for me, more often than not it was the only newspaper left unread at the Italian coffee shop where I’d stop for a macchiato each afternoon. After graduation I moved back home where foreign newspapers are harder to come by. As I result I’d even resort to taking the twenty-minute train ride to the next big town to get my hands on Monday’s Gazzetta (on Tuesdays, since it always arrived a day late).

My future uncertain (apart from knowing I didn’t want to live in small-town England), I moved back to Italy with the hope of making some kind of life there. I had one or two work prospects and stayed with a family friend in the town of Borgo San Lorenzo, an hour north of Florence. Borgo was a quiet town — fortunately I knew a lot of people and was quickly introduced to more. I even began giving English lessons and Art History lectures at the local high school, where I learned that my favourite newspaper was a useful social tool with which to ingratiate myself to the local ragazzi, affording me minor celebrity status among under-25s in the Borgo San Lorenzo area. For hoards of small-town Tuscan teens I wasn’t just the English guy, I was the English guy that reads la Gazzetta and supports Fiorentina.

For work (and social life) purposes I moved to Florence, where I was one of thousands of foreigners, but still probably the only one with a folded Gazzetta permanently in his back pocket. By this time the paper had become such a part of my life that I even brought my copy with me when purchasing a bag at Emporio Armani, just to make sure it would fit snugly inside. The newsstand on the corner of Viale Matteotti was my first stop every morning; after a few weeks I no longer had to tell the guy which paper I wanted. He even saved the issues I’d missed when I went home for long weekends. We never chatted for longer than thirty seconds at a time, and subjects didn’t extend far beyond the plight of Fiorentina or the weather. Imagine his surprise when after several months he discovered I was English! Over a period of a couple of years I can recall not buying la Gazzetta on only a handful of occasions: once when I overslept, once when staying in the remote countryside and once after the most severe snowstorm to hit Florence since 1985. Not counting those rare exceptions I was never without it; just as Linus had his security blanket, I had my Gazzetta. It was quite literally la vie en rose.

* * *

The twenty-first century Gazzetta now cost one euro, and had begun to enhance its own legend with full-colour graphics, a glossy Saturday supplement called SportWeek, and limited edition DVDs celebrating the soccer’s former greats. One day I was stunned to see that the paper had turned green to promote the release of the movie Shrek 2. Inside I learned that when it was formed in 1896 la Gazzetta had originally been printed on green pages, before switching to pink three years later. Undoubtedly, its distinctive colour has helped it stand out from the competition, but also seep into the Italian consciousness as a beloved national institution, even among those who’ve never read it in their lives.

Though I never missed an issue, my life — both professional and personal — had become so busy that I rarely had time to open it. Some days I’d only get the chance to unfurl the morning’s Gazzetta after getting into bed at night; in extreme cases I’d reluctantly place it atop a growing stack of newspapers that had been saved for a later date. I began to question my motives for buying la Gazzetta every single day. Was it because I wanted to, or because I felt I had to? That pink newspaper had become such an everyday part of me I didn’t even think about it. It was a piece of my personality I had to maintain. No longer just a morning ritual, it had become a habit, and when I calculated how much I’d spent on it down the years I felt like a total idiot.

Giving up la Gazzetta in a World Cup year was always going to be tough, and let’s say that I failed miserably. In the summer of 2006 I watched every Italy match at the same café, where the paper sat carefully folded on my lucky table #5 during the Azzurri’s dramatic and unexpected road to glory. The celebrations lasted all night, and by dawn Piazza Duomo was a sea of green broken glass. At around 7 o’clock a truck pulled up and dumped bundles of newspapers onto the ground, each one featuring the same front page photo of a jubilant Fabio Cannavaro holding aloft the World Cup trophy. The truck driver cut open the package and handed me la Gazzetta: it was still warm, like the fresh bomboloni at Pasticceria Donnini.

Suddenly my unwavering devotion to La Gazzetta seemed less foolish. It had taught me more about Italian culture and history than any textbook, and it was precisely for moments like this that I’d read it with almost religious regularity for so many years. Italy’s fourth World Cup victory had come after years of hard luck and controversy — I wasn’t even Italian, but I felt like I’d earned it.

It’s easy to live in Italy, it’s much harder to stay there. Not because life isn’t pleasant — it’s rarely anything else, and therein lies the problem. I knew if I ever left la Gazzetta would be one of the three things I’d miss the most (panettone and Campari Soda are the other two). In New York I can still live like an Italian to an extent, except here few people want to talk about football, and a black-and-white version of la Gazzetta on darker pink paper now costs three dollars. Not long after I moved to America the paper underwent a radical transformation from broadsheet to tabloid format, a revamp which was accompanied by a high-budget television commercial and a guerilla advertising campaign in which pink confetti fell like snow onto Milan’s centro storico. The effect was like seeing a best friend who’d undergone an ill-conceived cosmetic procedure. In the last few years La Gazzetta has seen more changes at the top than Juventus since calciopoli, and each new director has tampered with both its appearance and philosophy. I ended my readership on principle (the exorbitant cost may have also had something to do with it) and instead began consulting gazzetta.it for my Serie A news. I’m the first to admit that a flickering LCD screen can’t beat crisp newsprint, but knowing that la Gazzetta was no longer the same made me miss it a lot less.

Last month I returned to Italy with work. It was my first time back since leaving Florence, and I was excited to indulge in old pleasures. It was a Saturday morning when I arrived at Malpensa airport, and I was already glancing through la Gazzetta with a coffee at the bar as my colleagues waited at the carousel for their luggage. Driving through the foggy plains of Lombardy — where a decade earlier I’d lived as a student — I began thinking about Italy, and how the country had shaped my adult life over the last two decades. I’ve certainly spent significantly more of my “grown-up” years there than I have in my own country. It’s where I got my first real job, where I first paid a bill or monthly rent, where I learned to make a devastating spaghetti carbonara, where I once shook hands with Paolo Maldini. I even met my wife there.

It occurred to me that the one constant through all of this has been pink soccer daily la Gazzetta dello Sport, to this day the only newspaper I’ve ever bought with any degree of frequency. Much has changed in the last twenty years — Italy certainly has, and in many ways so have I. But my love for that country and its calcio has never waned. Call it nostalgia or a simple passion for a certain modo di vivere, but whenever I wake up in Florence or Milan or Rome my first thoughts are always the same: Gazzetta, cappuccino, brioche — in that order.

Livin’ La Dolce Vita

About five years ago, while spending a weekend at my parents’ house in England, I was flicking channels on a lazy Sunday afternoon when I came across a cooking programme called David Rocco’s Dolce Vita. The show was set in Florence, and followed the culinary exploits of a certain David Rocco, a good-looking young Canadian-Italian living the so-called “sweet life.” We’d see Rocco strolling through the piazza, picking up some ingredients at the local market before whipping up something tasty for his pals back at his apartment. I too was living in Florence at the time, and so I kept watching for the novelty aspect more than anything, although these scenes appeared so familiar to me that they almost felt too close to home.

A couple of days after returning to Florence I was invited by a friend to visit her new apartment near Piazza Santa Croce. When I arrived I was greeted with a tour of the flat, which soon enough led me to the kitchen. Upon entering I was immediately struck by an overwhelming sense of déjà-vu. I stopped and stood there for several moments trying to understand when I could have possibly been in this apartment before, despite being unable to recall having ever even walked down this particular street. Then it hit me: I was standing in David Rocco’s kitchen! It turned out the apartment belonged to David’s sister Maria, who also happened to be my friend’s boss. They simply used the apartment one month out of the year to tape the series. Until a few days earlier I’d never even heard of David Rocco, but my friend’s roommate was Canadian and explained that he was a former model and something of a household name in that country.

Over the ensuing months the Dolce Vita apartment became a gathering point for all the characters in our own lives, just like the principal set of any classic sitcom. My friend had a few promo DVDs from the series, which we sometimes watched to further enhance the surreal experience (imagine watching an episode of Seinfeld on Jerry’s couch). We enjoyed long Sunday lunches at the dinner table, and casual gatherings in the kitchen, around the marble-topped work surface upon which Rocco tosses his insalata. “Casa Rocco” – as it was soon dubbed – was also the scene of Thanksgiving dinners and memorable parties, including the evening of my 27th birthday and an ambitious Breakfast At Tiffany’s-themed night of debauchery. One night, after snooping around in the drawer which contained an impressive array of spatulas and mysterious utensils, another friend badly sprained her ankle on the kitchen floor, right where Rocco stands to drain his pasta. She had to be carried out of the apartment by paramedics on a stretcher, and spent the next month living at Casa Rocco with her leg in a plaster cast.

When Rocco and the crew arrived to shoot the new series, my friend was forced to move out for the entire month of May. One day I happened to visit the set: the apartment was crammed with lighting equipment and cables, but I missed out on meeting David. I even attended Maria Rocco’s wedding reception in the Florentine hills as my friend’s plus-one, but he wasn’t there either. Eventually, my friend moved out and the Casa Rocco era came to an abrupt end, but she did give me a watch she found abandoned on the set that I still wear to this day.

I hadn’t given David Rocco or his Dolce Vita much thought since, until I recently stumbled across an episode on the fledgling cable network Cooking Channel (751 on Time Warner Cable HD). I learned that the show is in its fifth series and has even spawned a book and a soundtrack, so it seemed like a good time to reacquaint myself.

Of course, there is something very obvious about calling a show about Italian cooking “Dolce Vita”. For the title of his 1960 film, Fellini employed the term “La Dolce Vita” with a generous dose of irony. It was meant to suggest a shallow life of excess, one which was ultimately bereft of meaning or direction — a commentary on the loss of traditional values in postwar Italy and the problems facing a new generation in the 1950s. We can forgive David Rocco for appropriating the overused phrase for his own show, and for predictably applying it in its broader cultural sense, that is, to suggest the most pleasurable aspects of Italian life. Naturally, we’re also treated to regular sweeping postcard panoramas of Renaissance architecture. But despite these corny marketing tools, the show is keen to convey a sense of Florence beyond tourism.

For the most part Rocco’s life does indeed appear exceedingly pleasureful, almost like an Italian take on a yuppie lifestyle. He drinks espresso, shops for food (and shoes), goes jogging, cooks dinner for his friends and spends weekends in Chianti with his wife, Nina, who plays herself. This apparent domestic bliss notwithstanding, the ever simpatico Rocco still seems to live the life of a carefree metrosexual bachelor. If the incessant aperitivo soundtrack is anything to go by, his is a world forever on the cusp of happy hour.

While not trained in the kitchen (“I’m not a cook – I’m Italian,” he says) Rocco certainly makes cooking look fun, and perhaps more importantly, effortless. His recipes center around the “cucina povera” or peasant food which provides the classic staples of Italian family life. Incorporating simple, fresh ingredients, our host presents many of his dishes as having been handed down by a relative (many are named after the “nonna” or “zia” who came up with them). Despite an affected habit of calling everyone he meets “Ciccio” and the mystifying employment of an electric golf cart to get about town (surely a Vespa would have been more accurate and appealing), Rocco’s own knowledge of Italian cuisine and culture is exemplary and the clichés which litter most depictions of Italian-Americans on our TV screens are here refreshingly absent.

Though hardly fellini-esque in either its scope or atmosphere, David Rocco’s Dolce Vita has more in common with the Fellini classic from whose title it borrows than is initially apparent. Episodic in nature, part reality and part fiction, for a cooking show it defies categorization. As the ad-hoc script swings back and forth between plot development and cooking demonstrations, Rocco himself regularly “breaks the fourth wall” to address the viewer directly. Meanwhile, the often improvised dialogue shuffles between Italian and English in a manner which only rarely becomes disorientating. Faced with the tricky task of often conversing with Italians for an English-speaking audience, the bilingual Canadian has been known to use both languages even in the same sentence. The cast is completed by Rocco’s own circus of eccentric “friends” who flesh out the episodes’ loose plotlines. Some play themselves, or versions of themselves, while others are entirely fictionalized characters. I find myself recognizing many of Rocco’s on-screen buddies (one of them, Max — an anglicization of his real name — was a former roommate of mine). Here we can begin to draw parallels with La Dolce Vita, for which Fellini cluttered the screen with actors and non-actors of various nationalities. The star of that film, Marcello Mastroianni, was intrigued by the multi-layered nature of cinema, and possessed an attitude to acting which began to stretch the boundaries of performance and reality. In his 1993 biography of the actor Donald Dewey describes Mastroianni’s approach as being founded upon the double fantasy role: that of the character being portrayed for the project in question and that of the actor working as a performer on the “adult playground” of the film set.

In 2005 Casa Rocco became an unlikely refuge from my own domestic frustrations and romantic melodramas. Watching David Rocco’s Dolce Vita on television now in New York – from the safety of several years and several thousand miles – is an altogether more complex sensation. I’m not particularly nostalgic about the years I spent in Florence — while I loved the city and fully basked in all of its wonders I have not forgotten the common frustrations of daily life in Italy, nor the challenges faced in attempting to pursue a more serious life there. Yet as the camera caresses the view from Piazzale Michelangelo, before focusing on Rocco as he dashes around the centro storico, I’m persistently prodded by recollections of my own experiences among Florence’s rain-soaked cobbled streets. It’s highly amusing to think back on evenings spent in Rocco’s kitchen, and even the bars and shops he frequents are those which I came to know well: Capocaccia, Chiaroscuro, Procacci, Semolina, Giubbe Rosse, Hotel Continentale and of course, the Dolce Vita bar in Piazza del Carmine are all given ample screen time. In a surprising twist on art imitating life (or is it vice-versa?), the perhaps inevitable consequence is that this Canadian cooking show has become a means of (re)living a vicarious and fictionalized version of my life in Florence. Though I’m still uncertain whether seeing your life (or a close approximation of it) on television makes it seem more, or less, real. In both his elaborate reconstruction of Rome at Cinecittà and the dreamlike fantasy sequences for which he became associated, Fellini too was inclined to suggest that reality could always be improved upon. Maybe that’s why David Rocco’s Dolce Vita somehow feels even better than the real thing.

San Siro Send-Off Turns Sour for Capitano Maldini

It was a sunny afternoon in Milan last Sunday as Paolo Maldini led his team out onto the San Siro turf for the final time. The Milan captain was greeted by the fervent roar of home support from a crowd of over 70,000 that had gathered to cheer their hero one last time and to honor an extraordinary career. Each fan waved aloft a special scarf commemorating the occasion, and even the players of Roma, Milan’s opponents for the day, wore GRAZIE PAOLO t-shirts over their playing jerseys as they took to the field.

As the teams lined up, an emotional Maldini saluted his family in the stands, before glancing to catch teammate Andrea Pirlo wiping away tears: “Ragazzi, let’s not start now, eh?” Indeed: despite the celebratory atmosphere, there was a game to be won, and for the victor a potential spot in next season’s Champions League beckoned. Yet it was at this moment that the Curva Sud, the area behind the goal on the second tier which is home to Milan’s most fanatical followers, chose to have its say, by unfurling a large banner which controversially criticized the man of the hour:

“Grazie capitano: sul campo un campione infinito
ma hai mancato di rispetto a chi ti ha arricchito”
“Thank you Captain: on the pitch an ageless champion
but you have shown a lack of respect towards those who made you rich.”

The celebration had been marred by a small section of Milan supporters, who chose Maldini’s farewell home match to turn on their loyal captain. For one of the sport’s greatest ambassadors, a model of service and fair play, it was a shocking reception.

The match kicked-off, and Milan came twice from behind before eventually losing 3-2, a defeat which has thrown their hopes of playing in Europe next season into jeopardy. At the final whistle, all twenty-two players ran to embrace Maldini, who then, at the encouragement of his colleagues, somewhat reluctantly embarked on a weary lap of honor. As he approached the curva, the same disgruntled fans took its second dig at their captain, unveiling a second banner.

“Per i tuoi 25 anni di gloriosa carriera sentiti ringraziamenti
da chi hai definito mercenari e pezzenti”
“For your glorious 25-year career you’ve received praise and thanks
from those you once defined as mercenaries and tramps.”

Spray-painted banners, known as striscioni, are a common sight in Italian soccer stadia, and play a significant role in ultrà culture. Gli ultras are Italian teams’ most die-hard supporters, the kind of people for whom being a football fan is a full-time job. Often topical and usually humorous (ultràs love a good play-on-words), striscioni can be used to great effect in rallying home fans or breaking the tension in an important game. If critical, they generally target the club’s upstairs management or a teams’s poor performances. Rarely do individuals come under personal attack. But in Maldini’s case, it was clear the milanisti had old scores to settle. To further rub salt into Maldini’s wounds, they even dusted off a giant red-and-black striped flag with a huge white number six, the shirt number (since retired) worn by former Milan legend Franco Baresi, from whom Maldini inherited the captain’s armband in 1997. The bitter disappointment was etched on Maldini’s face as he shot a sarcastic thumbs up to his critics on the second tier on the curva — he could even be seen mouthing the words “figli di puttane”, though after the game his only official comment was “I’m proud not to be one of them.”

“It’s my home — it always has been, it always will be.” This is how Paolo Maldini once described Milan’s Stadio Giuseppe Meazza, more commonly known as San Siro after the area of the city from which its imposing twists of concrete spiral into the Milanese fog. For decades it has been home to both Milanese clubs, Milan and Inter, but far more than just a historic soccer ground, for Maldini the famous stadium has also been his place of employment for the past twenty-four years. Maldini made his Serie A debut for the rossoneri in January 1985; he has since pulled on the red-and-black number three shirt 901 times, collecting seven scudetti (the Italian league championship title) and five European Cups/Champions Leagues in the process. He also won 126 caps for Italy between 1988 and 2002, playing in four World Cup tournaments. Maldini’s berth in football’s hall of fame has been assured for some time. Famed not only for his success but also his longevity, today the Italian is internationally adored and universally recognized as one of the greatest defenders to ever play the game. After extending his contract for one final season in 2008, the Milan captain finally announced his decision to retire from playing at the end of this season, just four weeks before his forty-first birthday.

So why the sudden backlash, and from his own fans no less? Italian sports daily La Gazzetta dello Sport tried to get to the bottom of the affair on Monday, even reporting comments of members of those responsible. “We just wanted to make a few things clear to him,” said Giancarlo Lombardi, leader of Milan’s organised support. “Maldini hasn’t always been respectful towards us in the past.” Nicknamed “Sandokan”, Lombardi claimed to be on his way to a bar just yards from Milan’s administrative headquarters in Via Turati. With him was Giancarlo Capelli, also known as “Il Barone”, historic capoultrà of the Curva Sud. Neither man was at Sunday’s game since both are already banned by Italian law from attending sporting events, but their orders had clearly been carried out.

Their grievance goes back to May 2005, when Milan dramatically lost the Champions League final to Liverpool after a penalty shoot-out, despite having galloped to a comfortable 3-0 lead at half-time. On Milan’s return from Istanbul the team ran into a group of hostile fans at Malpensa airport, who told the players they should ask for forgiveness. It was at this moment that Maldini, who had scored the game’s opening goal after just sixty seconds, responded with his now infamous “tramps” remark.

The second incident was before the 2007 Champions League final, in which Milan got their revenge over Liverpool, winning the match 2-1. A large portion of the curva ran into problems with the law in Athens, and did not appreciate Maldini’s decision to distance himself from the issue. As a consequence, the following August the entire curva refused to support the team at the 2007 European Supercup in Monaco, even preventing the more casual fans to cheer as the rossoneri ran out 3-1 winners against Sevilla. The surreal atmosphere continued at Milan’s home games for several months during the 2007-08 season.

“I don’t know why they decided to dredge up these things now,” said Maldini, recalling the incident in Wednesday’s Gazzetta, his first interview since the Sunday’s controversy. “I’ve never had a close relationship with the fans,” he told Giovanni Battista Olivero, “But not out of snobbery — with my last name I always had something to prove, and so I wanted to be judged solely by what I did on the pitch.” Maldini was referring to his father, Cesare, who captained Milan to its first European Cup success, over Benfica at Wembley in 1963. “I guess there are those who interpret this as arrogance or disregard.”

Asked about his strong comments immediately after the match, the Milan captain stands by them. “It was an instinctive response to an act which had been premeditated for days, months, maybe years. I didn’t have the chance to think. I was a wounded man.”

More than the attack itself, what hurt Maldini most was the silence of the club itself. “I don’t like the way they haven’t taken any position on the matter,” he explained. “There hasn’t been one comment. From the president down, not a word of solidarity towards me. Call me an idealist, but I believe that a club like Milan should disassociate itself from certain episodes.”

* * *

Italian fandom, like Italian politics, is an extremely complex world, both nationally and within the confines of a city or club. So complex in fact, that most outsiders (including the majority of the foreign press) too often resort to fulfilling lazy stereotypes rather than trying to fully understand the socio-cultural make-up of a club, city or nation. Though not a violent incident, Sunday was the latest poor advertisement for Italian fan behavior, in a week when Manchester United fans travelled for the Champions League final to Rome, dubbed “Stab City” by the Times of London. Of course, these same knife-wielding thugs are also responsible for the intricate and spectacular choreography common in Italian stadia, and so admired across Europe.

For several years the positions taken by Milan’s organized support have become increasingly unpredictable, and its relationship with the club’s management evermore turbulent. The notorious Fossa dei Leoni (Lion’s Den), the first ultràs group founded in Italy, was dissolved in 2005 almost overnight, following political disagreements with other fan organizations and an alleged collaboration with Digos, a special operations branch of the state police. The inner-politics of the various curva groups and their relationship with the club and the team has been strained ever since. The ultràs‘ biggest gripe, perhaps justifiably, has been Milan’s reluctance during recent transfer campaigns to invest in younger talent, instead opting repeatedly for established stars on the wrong side of thirty. This policy is perhaps harder to take given the fact that since the late-1980s until recently Milan — under the financial backing of media tycoon and current Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi — had spent large sums of money each summer on some of the world’s finest players, resulting in the most sustained period of success in the club’s history.

Maldini himself has faced criticism before. “It’s not the first time the fans have turned on me,” he recalled. “During the 1997-98 season, I’d been captain for six months when they began suggesting I wasn’t worthy of the armband. They even painted a banner outside my house which read, ‘Less Hollywood, more hard work.'” (Hollywood is a famous discoteca in Milan, and a popular hotspot where footballers, models and stars of TV can rub shoulders. Ironically, Maldini, his wife Adriana, friends and teammates spent the evening at the nightclub after Sunday’s game.) Perhaps due to his stature at Milan, and within the sport as a whole, Maldini has the mental capacity to render himself impervious. “These things make you grow,” he said. “I’ve developed an intellectual freedom and a freedom of expression which I’ll never give up.”

Over the course of the week the international football community has been quick to leap to Maldini’s defence. On Thursday, the morning after Barcelona’s Champions League victory over Manchester United, Barça coach Pep Guardiola dedicated the triumph to the Milan captain, saying, “He has all of Europe’s admiration.” The same day Milan’s general director Adriano Galliani officially responded to Maldini’s criticism of the club’s handling of the affair and lack of support towards him in the form of an open letter, which appeared on the club’s official website:

I read your interview and I understand your sadness: as you know, I’ve been under escort for the last two years because of the very same people who contested you.

It was me who took the decision to remain quiet: not just because I’d been advised, but because I believed, and still believe, that silence is the most effective weapon, and I did not wish to give these people further exposure after what happened on Sunday.

Maldini has routinely stated that he does not plan to go into coaching following the end of his playing career. Having played under his own father for both Milan (2001) and the Italian national team (1996-98), he has witnessed first-hand what effect that job can have on a man and his family. Paolo’s eldest son Christian is currently working his way through Milan’s youth ranks, and has by all accounts already developed many of his Dad’s signature defensive attributes. Milan have already made public their plan to resurrect the number three shirt (set for retirement along with Paolo) should another Maldini make the first-team squad.

Some feel that this final ugly act may push Maldini even further away from the game. He certainly has other interests outside of football, most notably the popular casual clothing line Sweet Years, which he founded with former Inter striker Christian Vieri in 2003. Though inexorably associated with one city and one club, Maldini clearly sees a world beyond the confines of Milan, both the team and the city. He has often expressed a desire to live in the United States –- he already owns a vacation home in Miami and is a regular visitor to New York.

On Sunday Maldini will play his last ever professional game against Fiorentina, a match which essentially has become a play-off for third and fourth place in Serie A and an automatic Champions League position. Whatever happens in Florence, Milan will begin next season with a new coach, the Brazilian Leonardo, a new captain,

Room with a View

When I moved to Italy in the autumn of 2003, I was lucky enough to be offered a place to stay by an old friend of my parents, a retired English teacher named Bibi. That isn’t her real name: she’s actually called Fortunata Maria, but for reasons unknown people have always called her Bibi, so that’s what we called her too. Bibi lived in a small town called Borgo San Lorenzo, in the Mugello valley, roughly an hour north of Florence (or half an hour if you’re being driven by an Italian). I’d first met Bibi when I was eleven — my family and I had spent many summers on holiday in Italy and had stayed with her on most of those visits. Consequently I had a lot of friends in the town, and was certainly taken care of at home: Bibi’s live-in help, a Neapolitan woman named Tina, would serve me an industrial quantity of pasta twice a day, and if I didn’t eat with them it was because I’d been invited to dinner by someone else.

Despite the relatively easy life I was leading in Borgo, there was little to do there, and like most small Italian towns this one became somewhat deserted every afternoon. A typical day generally consisted of meeting friends at the bar, reading La Gazzetta dello Sport, eating a big lunch and taking a nap, before getting up and doing the same thing all over again until bedtime. As much as I genuinely enjoyed watching television dramas most nights with Bibi, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that I couldn’t stay there forever, and that for all my young person’s needs — social, cultural and professional — Florence was where it was at. I’d begun working in the city after Christmas, and the daily commute on bus and train was beginning to take its toll. Though they were little more than an hour away, the difference between Florence and Borgo was more appropriately measured in light years. By the early spring I decided that five months was about all I could take.

Through a colleague I’d been given the number of a doctor in Florence — let’s call her OC — who as luck would have it was looking to rent out a room in her apartment, which had been described to me as “gorgeous”. While sharing a house with a Florentine divorcée perhaps wasn’t my ideal living situation, it made marginally more sense than staying in a sleepy Tuscan town with a reclusive former English professor and her hyperactive cat. When my colleague began describing the spectacular view from OC’s apartment my initial hesitancy began to wane and I decided it was an opportunity I had to investigate.

OC was on the island of Capraia that afternoon when I called to introduce myself, but we arranged to meet at her apartment a week later — by which time my already overly active imagination had begun to visualize a new life in Florence, complete with all its glamorous trappings. It was a decidedly unglamorous wet spring afternoon however the day OC and I finally met. Getting off the bus in Piazza della Libertà, I walked on Via Pier Capponi for several minutes in the direction of Piazzale Donatello before successfully locating the address through the drizzle. Realizing I was half an hour early, and with no bar in sight, I was forced to take cover beneath a concrete overhang protruding from the adjacent apartment block. Opposite was a non-descript yet quite desirable row of mid-century residential buildings, of which number seventeen was arguably the largest: a big yellow construction with a pizzeria on the ground floor and a hotel next-door. The top floor apartments were graced with a long balcony running the width of the building; trying to remember what vague information I’d been provided with I suspected one of those was OC’s.

At three-thirty I made a dash across the street and buzzed: a voice responded, I pushed open a heavy metal door and entered a small lobby decked in marble and glass. The elevator had a manual wooden door with a round window like a ship’s porthole, then two narrow doors with even narrower windows. The interior of the lift was covered in a red carpet, except for a bathroom-sized mirror attached to the back wall. Arriving at the sixth floor, I pulled open the thin double doors and saw OC beaming at me through the porthole window.

The first thing I noticed were her black leather pants — more Joan Jett than medical professional — which she paired with a white boat neck long-sleeved t-shirt. Streaks of grey ran through her shoulder-length brown hair which was pulled away from her face, as though she’d just showered. I guessed her to be in her early-fifties, though her youthful manner — and wardrobe — seemed to defy her mature visage.

OC and I shook hands and entered the apartment through double wooden doors, upon one of which was a plaque engraved with “Dott.ssa” (Dottoressa). We entered a dark and roomy hall dominated by a huge wooden dresser, possibly the largest piece of furniture I’d ever seen, itself half-hidden beneath a mountain of clutter. She then led me through frosted glass doors into a spacious living room. Despite the overcast weather, light poured in through sheer curtains covering glass doors leading out to the balcony. In front of the curtains was a huge potted plant, its droopy leaves partially covering one of two comfy beige sofas. Still wearing my raincoat, I sat down in the middle of the other one, directly beneath a giant canvas depicting a barnyard scene in the moments which followed the birth of Christ. OC revealed that it was a reproduction of a Ghirlandaio fresco in the church of Santa Trinità. She said she didn’t much care for it, but since it was the work of a friend of hers she felt somewhat encumbered by it. It wasn’t the only item of interest: two giant lanterns sat in the corners of the room which had originally been used on steam engines (OC’s grandfather had worked on the railways). She then offered me a choice of coffee or limoncello. I chose coffee; a minute later she returned from the kitchen with both.

OC sat down in an armchair directly in front of me, and placed a tray between us on a matching ottoman. She then proceeded to talk. And talk. And talk — until I realized I’d finished both my drinks without barely having uttered a word. She appeared perfectly happy to skirt conventional conversation starters — who I was, where I’d come from, what I was doing in Florence and how I’d ended up in her living room. Instead she soon began to ramble almost absentmindedly about her vacation home on Capraia, right down to its shoddy plumbing. I tried listening to her with intent at first, but soon my eyes began to drift around the room, observing the hand-painted wooden panels which hung on the wall behind her, and even glimpsing the hilltop town of Fiesole through a gap in the curtains. Though bemused by OC’s complete disinterest in her potential housemate, this wasn’t enough to put me off. Her apartment was the kind of vast, sprawling, Manhattan-style pad I’d only ever seen in old Italian movies, and having got through the door I was not about to give it up. Besides, as far as I was concerned the less interest OC showed in my life the better.

I hadn’t even yet seen my room, but really I didn’t need to: one glance at the view from the kitchen sealed the deal for me. More French doors gave way to another balcony, and beyond a row of trees the city’s mighty Duomo rose up defiantly through the afternoon drizzle. I couldn’t possibly turn down this opportunity, if only to make my friends eternally jealous. We agreed on a monthly figure for rent: €350, bills included. I couldn’t believe my luck.

* * *

Less than two weeks later I arrived back at OC’s, this time with two large suitcases in tow packed with all my worldly possessions. OC welcomed me with open arms and introduced me to a friend with whom she was enjoying a post-lunch cigarette. The friend offered me something to eat — some kind of sausage and salad — which I politely accepted. She seemed more interested in me than OC had on our first meeting, who again paid me scant attention, as if twenty-something British men move into her home every week, and I got the impression I was merely a footnote upon the epic nature of her own daily concerns.

The neighborhood — Florence’s affluent Campo di Marte district just outside the centro storico — was perfect. The languages school where I taught was a short walk away, as was the football stadium, which to my delight was even visible from OC’s living room. A door off the kitchen led to my room, although I should really say quarters, since I had a hall, bedroom, bathroom and balcony (which shared the same spectacular view as the kitchen) all to myself. The room was furnished with a beautifully carved wooden bed, a large wardrobe, a small chest of drawers, an antique bookcase and a brand new IKEA desk. That night I went to bed early but was kept awake by the incessant drone of traffic emanating from Viale Matteotti, the wide tree-lined boulevard running behind the next row of buildings. I’d never lived in a town even half the size of Florence, and arriving directly from Borgo made the transition even more dramatic. From my new bed I gazed at Brunelleschi’s cupola (which appeared to loom even larger at night) as the sound of buzzing Vespas peeled up and down the street. At last, urban civilization — modern and not so modern — could be seen and heard, and the next morning I felt reborn, as if I’d just awoken from a five-month socio-cultural slumber.

OC had two beautiful children from her dissolved marriage, a girl and a boy. Though their father lived just a five-minute walk away, only one divided his time between both parents; the other (the daughter, who was older) had chosen to live permanently with her mother. Their dad lived a short walk away in Piazza d’Azeglio. I spoke to him a couple of times on the phone, and even met him once. He wasn’t particularly friendly, but then his ex-wife had suddenly taken in a foreign man half her age, so I couldn’t really blame him for being skeptical. I remember a divorce lawyer coming to the house a few times, but I never asked OC about him or why they separated. She once suggested it was because she liked to watch Stargate and he didn’t, which I supposed was as good a reason as any.

OC’s daughter was a typical Italian twelve-year old, her interests revolving mainly around horses and the British boy band Blue, yet she was sassier than most kids her age and seemed genuinely excited by this unconventional domestic set-up. Her son turned ten shortly after I moved in, and life was certainly more hectic (and louder) when he was around. Mealtimes were particularly chaotic: all three would eat at the kitchen table, and from my nearby room it seemed at times as though they were competing with the TV to see who could make the most noise.

I would often be asked to join them for dinner, an offer I readily accepted out of polite gratitude but also based on the fact that the combined din of two excitable kids and the blare of Italian primetime television made it impossible to concentrate on anything, despite the two doors which separated us. OC herself was the possessor of a booming, almost manly voice: when my Dad called the apartment and she answered the first thing he said to me was, “Who was that bloke?” Needless to say her regular breakfast phone calls to patients and colleagues soon meant I no longer required a conventional alarm clock. OC could whip up a pretty tasty pasta or roast pork, and was also fond of cooking homemade hamburgers. When the weather got warmer she regularly made gazpacho or panzanella for lunch. I enjoyed eating and watching cartoons with the kids, and in those early months we’d often engage in epic after-dinner soccer matches in the hall which would last until bedtime (or until somebody got hurt by slipping on the tiled marble floor). This was certainly preferable to spending the evening trapped with OC, for once the kids were out of sight I began to understand just what kind of person she was.

As was my initial impression, it was soon confirmed to me that OC did not excel as a conversationalist. What she did do well were monologues, and could talk quite happily for long periods without interruption. Of course, any interjection on my part was unlikely as she limited herself to discussing subjects which I knew little or nothing about: Etruscan ceramics, the commercially unsuccessful films of Gérard Depardieu, or her trip to Greece in 1971. It soon became evident that any topic in which I might offer any relevant input was strictly off-limits. When talk did turn to the everyday my opinions on food or life in Italy held absolutely no weight whatsoever by pure virtue of my being British. Conveniently, OC claimed not just her Florentine status, but thanks to her parents was also equal parts Roman and Venetian, and despite never having lived there seemed to understand everything there was to know about Naples too. With four of the country’s major cities among her areas of expertise, any comment I had to make about Italy could be dismissed in an instant. Meanwhile, OC remained completely oblivious to my own life and background.

I soon realized these were the classic traits of a very insecure person, and I began to feel some pity towards her. There was something sad about the fact that all her lengthy anecdotes recalled events which took place at least twenty years ago, as if her life had somehow stopped after having children. Sometimes her stories weren’t even first-hand: I remember one evening she recounted a lengthy tale about a friend of a friend who’d become involved in a complex romantic triangle while living in Brazil (which wasn’t as exciting as it sounds). OC’s highly elevated sense of self-importance was evident not just from her choice of subjects but also her preference for the supposedly intellectual channel Rai Tre (the third station of Italy’s state network RAI), as well as her refusal to let others speak. When a lengthy story finally drew to a close she would abruptly switch off the television, utter a one word goodnight (“Notte!”) and march out of the kitchen, like a performer exiting stage right as if to deliberately avoid the scorn of critics. Of course, there were no critics, just a speechless and weary audience of one.

After dinner OC and the kids would get ready for bed almost immediately, so by ten o’clock each night I pretty much had the run of the place. They never sat in the big living room where OC and I had had our first meeting, and rarely did I, preferring instead to work in my room, or practice my saxophone. Sometimes late at night I’d sit on the balcony with a cup of tea and admire the breathtaking panorama of floodlit Renaissance architecture. To my good fortune the other bedrooms were on the opposite side of the apartment from mine, so I could even listen to music at night without disturbing anyone. Rather than use the large double-doors, OC gave me keys to a side entrance into the kitchen, allowing me to come and go as I pleased. This arrangement worked just fine, although in the first three months I became locked inside the apartment on two separate occasions.

OC’s huge bedroom with en suite was dominated by a large bed, giant wardrobes and the strong pervading essence of Chanel. Despite the ample closet space her shoes and clothes were routinely strewn about the room like those of a messy teenager. Both kids had their own rooms and shared a bathroom, which was inevitably something of a disaster: clothes, toys and dirty towels littered the blue-tiled floor and the mirror was smeared with pre-adolescent messages scrawled in lipstick. It did not take me long to discover the kids took after their mother, at least as far as general tidiness was concerned. OC’s organizational skills left much to be desired, even for an Italian. Her office, or study, or whatever you wish to call it — personally I considered “bombsite” a more apt term — was the area worst hit. An explosion of open drawers overflowed with countless white boxes of drugs and pills, while hundreds of white paper sticky notes bearing the name of various pharmaceutical companies (the kind that doctors are given free bundles of at conferences) were scattered throughout like fallen leaves. There was a dining table in the middle of the room which was never used for dining, or anything else for that matter, as every inch of its surface was covered in the same mess.

Likewise, the kitchen table had to be cleared of bills, homework, junk mail and more of the same sticky notes each day before it could be used for eating. Most of this clutter would be unceremoniously dumped onto the nearest chair, which meant in order to sit down the same clutter in turn had to be placed onto the kitchen floor, where invariably it would remain, sometimes for several weeks. Incredibly, this untidiness had apparently extended to the interior of OC’s car — a white ’95 Honda Accord — which was identifiable by the mountains of mail and sticky notes piled upon the passenger seats. Ironically, despite all those sticky notes OC was forever without a scrap of paper to hand, so whenever she needed to jot down a phone number or an appointment — or even when helping with math homework — she would simply take a pencil and write directly onto the white kitchen table. Her later attempts to clean her scrawled notes only transformed them into unsightly grey smudges.

OC appeared equally comfortable writing on any surface of her home: upon the white-washed kitchen walls she would record her kids’ heights — and mine — at monthly intervals. I had several years (and feet) on these two Italian tykes, but unlike them I wasn’t getting any taller, so my height remained represented by a crude unwavering pencil line six feet off the ground, next to which OC scrawled my name erroneously as JAMENS. This proved another ridiculous burden I had to live with. What began as an innocent child’s mistake (my name had been entered with an unwanted “N” as we played a computer game) soon took on a life of its own, and I quickly became known as “Jamens” (pronounced Yah-mens) by the entire household. While I initially took it as a sign of affection the habit soon began to grate, particularly when OC called me by this name in front of people or when discussing more serious matters.

* * *

After six months OC and I had settled into a pretty comfortable routine, though we led completely separate lives. I ate with her and the kids less and less, for fear of being subjected to another installment of The OC Show. Instead I’d eat in a hurry before they did, often twice a day, making sure instead to always take advantage of the rare occasions when they were out. As soon as the weather warmed up, OC and the kids would spend entire weekends at their holiday villa on the island of Capraia, a two-and-a-half hour ferry ride from the Tuscan port of Livorno. Sometimes they invited me to come with them, usually at the last minute, by which time I’d usually already have social or work commitments. On the occasions when I had no weekend plans I declined the offer anyway: though the thought of relaxing on a Mediterranean island was hugely appealing, spending an intense weekend in OC’s company was considerably less so. I’d begun to value my infrequent moments of personal time more highly than anything, and those weekends home alone were more fun than I’ve ever had on any beach.

One Saturday morning in early June OC and the kids left to catch the ferry for the weekend. They wouldn’t be back until Sunday night, and so I’d decided to make the most of their absence by hosting a little party. The second they were out the door I set about getting the apartment into shape: I removed the mail and sticky notes from the kitchen table, and cleaned the kitchen floor, off of which I recovered (in addition to the usual paper products): a stale, gnawed piece of bread, assorted shapes of dried pasta and a stray pair of girl’s underwear. Having finished scrubbing every surface I had just begun preparing food when I heard a key in the front door. Panicked, I had no time to react before OC was standing in the kitchen. Turns out they’d missed the boat, literally. “Abbiamo perso la nave!” she bellowed, almost proudly, like a tipsy old sea captain bursting into the harbor tavern. Naturally, she was oblivious to how her disorganization had ruined my own weekend. (When I finally got the chance again to throw the party — almost a year later — I named the event Mamma, ho perso la nave, literally “Mommy, I missed the boat”: a direct reference to my previous hampered attempt to play host and to the movie Home Alone, which in Italy is called Mamma, ho perso l’aereo.)

You may wonder why I put up with such limited freedom (not to mention OC’s eccentricities) for so long, but for all the valid reasons for moving out there were others which kept me at Via Pier Capponi. That view for starters. Plus, I was paying less in rent than everyone else I knew in Florence and had no utilities. Best of all, in summer OC and the kids would relocate to Capraia for most of July and August, leaving me free to bask in a sun-kissed, Mastroianni-inspired, fantasy life. On Saturday mornings I’d buy La Gazzetta and La Repubblica and read them (and their glossy magazine supplements) over breakfast in Piazza Strozzi, before heading home for lunch and an afternoon tanning on the balcony. In the evenings I’d pour myself a Campari Soda while preparing dinner (a luxury in itself), after which I’d retire to the soft grandeur of the living room, where I’d listen to music, watch meaningless pre-season soccer friendlies or even indulge my passion for classic Fellini. OC had left me the keys to her bike, which meant if I wanted to meet friends for a drink I could be on the other side of the Arno in less than ten minutes. One Sunday morning I woke up early and rode into town. I circled the narrow streets and vast piazze, usually thronging with tourists but now instead deserted, as if I’d stumbled upon an abandoned film set.

The pleasure of those two months was enough to keep me in that apartment for over two years, even though I knew my idyllic lifestyle was destined to end as soon as OC & Co. returned to Florence. In their extended absence the apartment had become all mine, a spotless paradise cultivated in my own image. I even transferred my stereo into the living room, where I’d lounge and plunder through my collection of classic albums. Sadly, this perpetual bliss was punctured the second OC’s front door key twisted the lock. Immediately, it was as if they’d never left: bags were thrown on the floor, clothes were dumped on the backs of chairs and clutter — keys, mail, toys, whatever it may be — were laid to rest on any available surface. I retired to my room and began calling up my friends in search of an escape.

Having become so accustomed to having the place to myself, when OC and the kids returned I’d look for any opportunity to stay out of the house. When friends suggested meeting for dinner or a drink I never hesitated; when no such offer was forthcoming I’d be content to roam the streets for as long as I could, until, defeated by cold or hunger or both, I’d reluctantly return home. If I could wait until ten I’d generally be guaranteed to avoid running into OC, which in part made me quite willing to work long hours at the languages school where I taught. Sometimes I’d go out for a drink or a pizza with students or colleagues, other times I’d go directly back to a now silent apartment. If OC did happen to still be up past ten, I’d often walk into the kitchen to find her watching TV, at which point she’d thrust a glass of limoncello into my hand. “Chi non beve in compagnia o è un ladro o una spia,” she’d say to me, which literally translates as, “He who doesn’t drink in others’ company is either a thief or a spy.”

Before I could respond, or escape, OC would launch into one of her famous monologues, perhaps a predictable anti-Berlusconi tirade or simply a depressing review of contemporary Italian society’s general malaise. Let’s just say OC didn’t do small-talk. As a self-proclaimed Florentine, she was the first to criticize the city for its problems and shortcomings, but also quick to defend it. If I’d been to a restaurant for dinner, rather than ask me where I’d eaten or how the meal was she’d simply scoff, “Ha! Us Florentines would never dream of eating out in the centre of Florence!” Once she asked me completely out of the blue if I’d ever been to Venice. I had, though not in about fifteen years, but thinking fast I answered, “Yes, many times.” I could actually see the disappointment on OC’s face, as this meant she had to limit her speech to just five minutes, and the hour-long lecture to which I would otherwise have surely been subjected would have to wait for another time, or another unsuspecting victim.

Any pity for OC this scene may invoke should be disregarded immediately. I did pity her, but her situation was caused purely and solely by her complete social ineptitude. The few friends of hers I did meet were very nice, and always showed a much greater interest in me than she ever did. They never failed to compliment me on my Italian, something OC herself never once acknowledged. Perhaps predictably for someone with such vast insecurities, she clearly began to resent me for having any kind of social life of my own, and on the rare occasions when my friends and OC did cross paths she was usually rude or at the very least inappropriate. One stormy Sunday night a colleague, SM, an at times painfully polite British woman and a dear friend, came over to pick me up on the way to the movies. OC was ironing in the kitchen when I introduced the two women to each other. “Have you come to prepare lessons together?” she sniggered between drags on a cigarette, before letting out a nicotine-induced chuckle. SM, clearly taken aback, seemed forced to defend herself. “Actually, we’re just going to the cinema.” Sadly OC’s pathetic comment was pretty typical, which is why I avoided inviting people over unless I could guarantee that she wasn’t going to be around.

I’d been at Via Pier Capponi for little over a year when I became involved with JP, an American woman whom I’d originally met in the spring of the year before, just a couple of weeks after moving to Florence. JP was visiting Florence for the summer, and spent several nights at the apartment, though we usually only returned home after midnight. One Saturday afternoon we ran into OC as we were leaving the house, just as she and the kids were sitting down to lunch. The kids waved ciao and OC herself seemed perfectly at ease with the fact that a girl had spent the night in my room. I was twenty-six after all — could she really be surprised?

The summer rolled on and JP and I spent many more nights in the apartment together, including whole weekends while OC was in Capraia. Officially, JP was staying in the apartment of a mutual friend, who was also out of town, so other nights we’d stay at her place. JP left Florence at the end of June, by which time OC and the kids had moved to Capraia for July and August. When they eventually returned from the island, almost two months later, OC took me aside as I boiled water for a cup of tea. “James, don’t bring people into the house,” she told me coldly. “It’s a problem for the kids. And a problem for my ex-husband.” It struck me as extremely inappropriate that her ex-husband might be weighing in on my private life, and I knew for a fact that the kids had no problem with it (they’d even asked me excitedly about it). Of course, OC had neglected to mention the real issue, which was that it was a big problem for her. What really irked me was her use of the word gente (“non portare gente in casa” was what she’d said) as if I was picking people up off the street each night. She’d never mentioned anything about me having people over, but I don’t know what else she expected. Maybe it had never occurred to her. At that point I vowed (to myself at least) never to bring anyone else into the apartment, and to begin actively seeking alternative accommodation.

* * *

By now my motives for moving out were beginning to outweigh the reasons to stay. Though the apartment belonged to her, OC had never once attempted to adjust her lifestyle to suit the fact that I was now also living there. She showed little or no respect for my needs, and it seemed both unfair and ridiculous that I shouldn’t be able to indulge in normal social activities. And as spectacular as that view still was, it certainly wasn’t enough to make me put up with everything else. I’d also now come to the realization that OC was not just untidy and disorganized, but actually dirty. Mystifyingly, she seemed incapable of using an ashtray, and would routinely flick ash into the kitchen sink, where it would fall onto the stack of dirty dishes which remained from lunch. Once, as I attempted to clean the living room, I came across an upturned ashtray under a coffee table, its grey, powdery contents now embedded into the rug. On one unpleasant occasion I even found a partially used cigarette in my own bathroom: evidently OC had been smoking while doing laundry (my bathroom also housed the apartment’s only washing machine), and had simply extinguished it in the nearest receptacle.

Meanwhile, OC’s now teenage daughter had also become less pleasant to be around. I’d somehow been oblivious to her transformation from pony-loving child into sulky adolescent, which she’d managed to complete in the space of just a few weeks. Only months earlier I was being dragged into town by her and her friends to go shopping or helping her choose an outfit for a party at her behest. Now I barely saw her, and only reluctantly would she acknowledge me when I did. I put this down to teenagerdom but it was clear I was no longer a novelty in the household. Even OC’s generosity toward me had waned. When my wallet had been stolen a few months after I moved in she’d lent me the €60 I’d lost, now she barely gave me the time of day.

Whether she knew it or not, OC was headed fast for another divorce, this time without even getting married. By the spring I couldn’t wait to move out, and nothing about her behavior looked likely to make me change my mind. In March I left to visit JP in New York, just days after learning that my grandmother had been hospitalized having suffered a severe stroke. When I returned to Florence there was a message from my Dad telling me she’d died. “Yeah, a patient of mine died the other day,” was OC’s immediate and thoughtless response, which only demonstrated that she was even more self-absorbed than I’d originally thought.

Immediately I began consulting friends about alternative living situations and scouring the hundreds of apartment ads which litter Florence’s streets and lampposts. That summer’s World Cup gave me the perfect excuse to be out all night watching football and was a welcome distraction from apartment hunting. One weekend in June I took the train up to Milan to visit a friend on Lago Maggiore. I had no idea of the surprise which awaited me on my return.

I had an early start on Monday and was in the middle of making breakfast when OC breezed into the kitchen, still wearing her dressing gown and enjoying an early cigarette. “Buongiorno, Jamens,” she said. We never ran into each other in the mornings so I should have perhaps known this time would be memorable.

“I’ve got some news for you,” she announced, as I stood eating my cereal. “We’re moving house!” I spluttered milk onto my tie. I was genuinely shocked, and had so many questions, mostly of the what/when/where variety. OC helpfully filled me in and told me the address. “Number eleven, like the bus. We move at the end of the month.” I assumed this had all happened suddenly, but in actual fact it turned out OC had been negotiating the sale of the apartment for some time.

“I’m so glad it’s all over,” she confessed. “Because the whole situation has caused me a lot of stress.” Naturally, OC failed to acknowledge the stress that had suddenly been placed upon me, as I now found myself with less than two weeks to find a new place to live. To my astonishment, it evidently had not occurred to her that I might see this as a healthy opportunity to move out.

“Obviously, you can come with us,” she explained. “The new place is smaller, but you can share with one of the kids.” Her suggestion was so preposterous as to literally leave me speechless. My current living situation was already less than ideal; I definitely wasn’t about to make it worse by sharing a room with a twelve-year-old. Instead, I declined OC’s offer, explaining how I wish I’d had more time to figure out just what I was going to do.

That afternoon I met my friend KO for a coffee, who generously suggested I move in with her. She was about to leave for Barcelona for a month, so it seemed like a handy stop-gap solution. I began packing up my possessions into large boxes, and the night before she left moved the first of them into her studio. The new apartment was only a ten-minute walk away but it took me the best part of four days to transfer everything. Most of this work had to be carried out either late at night or early in the morning; it was the last days of June, and by mid-morning simply too hot to be walking under the beating sun, let alone with luggage in tow. On the fourth day, a Sunday morning, I ran into OC in the kitchen as I lugged the final few boxes to my new lodging. Still in her robe, cigarette in hand, she seemed confused.

“Wait,” she said, apparently struggling to grasp what was happening. “Are you moving everything on foot?” With a wine box full of paperbacks in my arms and a giant Benetton duffle bag over my shoulder I could only muster a shrugged “Yeah”. Exhausted, I slumped my cargo onto the kitchen floor, expecting her to offer to help me take the rest of my stuff in her car, which was parked downstairs. It would have been great had she suggested it earlier but I wasn’t about to refuse. At that point she continued. “Well, think of the money you’ve saved instead of going to the gym.” OC turned on her heel and exited the kitchen, stage right. It was the last conversation we ever had. I hauled the remaining bags and boxes into the elevator and left Via Pier Capponi for the final time.

The next two months were spent living in a tiny studio which could barely contain all my possessions, and when KO returned from Spain we were forced to share everything, including a bed. My attempts to find a place of my own proving frustrating, in the end we both wound up moving into a new apartment together, by miraculous convenience located directly upstairs. It was a beautiful, four-bedroom property, and the size of the place meant we had to find two extra roommates. By extraordinary serendipity the first person to answer our ad was HG, an Italian literature student who soon became my girlfriend. My new landlady, a highly strung and heavily pregnant woman clad head-to-toe in checkered Burberry, was, in many ways, the exact reverse of OC, yet together with our new roommates, still proved capable of causing me bundles of unwanted stress (but that’s another story). I finally felt my luck was changing: I was enjoying my new life and the undoubted freedom it brought me. Meantime still I had heard nothing from OC.

The months went by, then one early summer evening I was on my way to a Fiorentina game when not far from the stadium I noticed a white Honda, not unlike OC’s, caught in the matchday traffic. The car passed me as I prepared to cross the street, but the low sun’s glare gave me no chance of identifying it as hers or not. When I’d reached the other side I turned and saw a dog stick its brown head out of the backseat window, before the car itself disappeared quickly around the corner and out of view. Knowing OC didn’t have a dog, I could only assume it had been somebody else.

The following afternoon, I was sitting reading the paper when my phone beeped. It was a text message from OC! Turns out the white Honda had belonged to her after all:

“Evitare il saluto è un gesto scortese privo di buoni motivi. Buona fortuna.”
 “Avoiding a greeting is an impolite gesture without motive. Good luck.”
(It should be pointed out that to genuinely wish someone luck in Italy one says “In bocca al lupo” or “into the mouth of the wolf”, to which one always should reply “Crepi” or “Death to the wolf”; OC’s use of the literal term “good luck” was clearly meant in a less than positive, dismissive sense.)

Almost a year had passed since I’d moved out and this was the first time I’d heard from her. Not a phone call to see where I’d moved, not an invite to their new place for dinner, not even an SMS to check I was still alive — until now. I debated over replying for several minutes; on the one hand it was such a resentful message I didn’t want to give weight to it, but at the same time I didn’t want her to go through life thinking I was the one with the problem. So I wrote back explaining that I hadn’t seen her and if I had I’d have naturally said hello. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I never heard from her again.

HG and I moved out in June, and it wasn’t many months later that we found ourselves in New York. Sometimes, when I’m watching Fiorentina on cable television, or even if I hear an Italian voice on the street, my mind drifts back to Florence and begins to reminisce. I wonder what OC and the kids are up to now. I think of her blaring voice, the cigarettes and those endless monologues. I remember scorching, Campari-drenched afternoons on the balcony, and long winter nights with just Chet Baker and Amaro Lucano for company. You might call such recollections of Via Pier Capponi affectionate, nostalgic even. And maybe that’s what they are. But the only thing I ever really miss is that view.

Raising the Bar

The life of a young writer is a hectic and stressful existence, often involving long hours of frantic typing as a deadline fast approaches, time which could be better spent sleeping or enjoying a proper dinner. However, occasionally we must abandon the iBook (or 1960 Lettera 32 Olivetti typewriter) and venture into the real world, all in the name of “research”. This usually means checking out a new bar or club, a task which has the added incentive of perhaps getting a free drink and/or meeting some girls.

Thanks to their brief mention in Elle Decor magazine, I had recently become aware of two designer hotels, The Continentale and the Gallery Hotel Art, each owned and styled by the Salvatore Ferragamo family. Elle boldly describes these establishments as “the jewels in Florence’s hotel crown” — both hotels sit opposite each other in a tiny piazza neatly tucked behind the Ponte Vecchio called Viccolo dell’Oro (literally “Little Street of Gold”).

I wander through the sliding door of the Continentale Contemporary Pleasing Hotel (to give it its full name) and enter into a chic Hepburn-inspired ’60s fantasy world, though it’s much too tasteful for the term “swinging bachelor pad”. Resembling 007’s secret love nest, the lobby is a series of wooden logs, kitsch lamps and plush pink chairs. A smart man and woman stand poised like mannequins halfway up the steps, who then immediately spring to life, inviting me to take a look around the building’s several floors and mezzanines. I glide up a short flight of stairs where I arrive in what appears to be a mini-movie theatre, where the final rain-sodden frames of Breakfast at Tiffany’s play out on a large plasma screen. For a moment I almost wish I didn’t already live in Florence, just so I could come and stay here. When I return to the reception, the blonde woman awaits with a brochure, which takes the format of a selection of large-scale postcards slipped inside a clear plastic envelope.

I take a few steps across the piazza and pull open the heavy wooden door of the Gallery Hotel Art. Inside, the staff is older but equally responsive to my polite inquiries, and once again I am encouraged to admire the lounge and restaurant. I am offered a drink at (The Fusion Bar) attached to the hotel, which from what I can gauge is a pretentious hangout for Florence’s superficial elite. The sign outside is enough to tell you that (The Fusion Bar) perhaps takes itself a little too seriously: the very name of the bar has to be contained within the safety of parentheses.

I perch on a chunky leather stool, order my usual Campari Soda, and begin to browse through the numerous design-related coffee-table volumes displayed by the bar. Several minutes later, the barman presents me with my drink. I don’t know what he did to it or why it took him so long, but it’s the best Campari Soda I’ve ever tasted. A long oblong dish of unidentifiable edibles arrives, at which I prod cautiously with an extra-long cocktail stick. As I mix my aperitivo and nibble on what I assume is sushi, I turn to admire the blown-up photograph of a woman in her underwear answering the telephone on her hands and knees, which covers the back wall.

continentale 2

While places of luxury are often over-priced, overwrought and over-rated, but they do know how to treat you well and the staff have a habit of making you feel like the most important person in the room. After I’ve finished my drink and am about to leave, the concierge asks me if I’ve yet had the opportunity to see the roof terrace of the Continentale. I respond with an enthusiastic no, and he leads me to a trio of elegant young women who stand chatting by the potted plants on the decked entrance to the bar. The dapper little man picks out one of the group. “Stefania,” he interrupts. “Can you please show James to the roof terrace?” I’m so instantly enamoured by Stefania I forget to ask how he knows my name. “Certamente,” Stefania says, and with a swish of her raven ponytail she escorts me back to the Continentale. “Follow me.”

We return past the candy-coloured seats and split-screen Audrey prints and enter a stark white cube. Lit from all six sides and possibly deriving from the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey, this futuristic box turns out to be the elevator. Stefania presses an invisible button and a few seconds later we step out at the top floor, where we walk onto the Contintentale’s roof garden, also known as the Sky Lounge. OK, so the name sounds like one of those tacky bars at Heathrow where holiday-makers drink Budweiser at eight in the morning, but I am willing to forgive that oversight. Not five minutes ago (The Fusion Bar) had seemed to be the epitome of cool, but this place is on another level, literally. I think it’s what they call “raising the bar”.

The square wooden terrace is lined with a crisp green hedge and a pale cushioned bench, upon which lounge a dozen or so people apparently well-accustomed to this lifestyle, as not even the presence of Stefania garners a reaction. A vast canopy keeps out the low sunlight, and the tables — which are made of steel framed boxes — each have a bulb gently glowing inside. The overall look is slightly Scandinavian, but something tells me none of it’s from IKEA. With a subtle wave of her slender hand, Stefania presents the stunning panorama, pointing out the Duomo and Palazzo Vecchio. “You can probably see my balcony from here,” I suggest, failing to impress her.

continentale sky lounge

This is such a magical setting, it comes as no surprise to learn that the Sky Lounge has witnessed over two dozen marriage proposals since its refurbishment in 2003. I am about to get down on one knee in front of Stefania when she turns and says, “I’ll leave you to enjoy yourself.” I thank her for the ride in the elevator and tell her I’ll be back on Thursday. It’s at this point I become aware of the sophisticated groove which seems to emanate from miniature speakers discreetly hidden within the foliage. I take in my surroundings and decide I’m not quite ready to leave just yet. Feeling slightly under-dressed but blending quite well in my faded t-shirt and retro adidas, I order another drink, which I sip in the company of skinny foreign models as the setting sun glistens on the Arno.

Twenty-four hours later I’m back at my usual bar for a routine aperitivo. My Campari has a slice of lemon instead of orange, floating between two rapidly melting lumps of ice which I poke at aimlessly with a straw. Needless to say this place does not enjoy the distinction of punctuation around its name. I’m sitting on metal garden furniture while munching on bits of mini pizza, the CD keeps skipping and there’s no sign of a roof terrace. My mind continues to drift back to the Continentale, where I can’t help but look forward to my next trip with Stefania in the white cube. But tonight I’m with friends and don’t feel at all out of place. Still somehow I’m not satisfied. Something’s missing. It’s too late — the bar has been raised.