SUMMER IN THE CITY
Beat the heat by seeking out Florence’s secret palace gardens
Florence, the visible part of it anyway, is all stone, and in high summer it’s a griddle. To cross a piazza at midday in July is to feel the soles of your shoes begin to melt and the top of your head to frazzle. But for those who live like the locals, it’s a pleasure garden. I’m here in a June heatwave, and we are enjoying summer the way the Tuscans have for centuries, quietly in gardens and cloisters by day, and nosily in piazzas by night.
Florence is cupped by hills. We take a taxi up to San Miniato al Monte, with its blackand-white romanesque facade, and take most of a day to walk back into town.
We buy glasses full of an icy slush of fresh strawberries, and set off down a flight of steps up which pilgrims have climbed for centuries.
cypresses shade it, roses and jasmine spill over it. It leads all the way down to a fortified gatehouse in the medieval city walls.
A short walk past painted palaces, and we are off-road again, in the recently re- opened Bardini garden, which is pitched at a 45 per cent gradient.
This hillside has been a garden for more than 700 years. At the uphill end there is a cafe, where we eat mozzarella and pink grapefruit ices, and a canal presided over by a baby chinese dragon in bronze. A vertiginous stone staircase plummets straight down, but the way to go is zig-zag, along paths l i ned with cloudlike hydrangeas and wisteria.
A lane leads directly onto the larger, grander Boboli Gardens. There we collapse on the grass of one of the secret spaces, aromati- cally hedged with bay and rosemary, where the courtiers of the Grand Duke of Tuscany came to giggle, conspire and make love.
By the time we emerge, the swallows have begun t heir evening display, swooping over the Arno, the tour buses have chugged away and the city’s residents are out on the bridges to flirt and watch the sunset.
Back to the Hotel l’orologio, from whose glazed top-floor loggia we can contemplate the marble facade of Santa Maria novella.
We cross the river again, to eat dinner in the Piazza Santo Spirito at Borgo Antico, where waiters weave between the tightly packed outdoor tables.
We’ve established a pattern. For the next three days we are like dogs, slouching from shade to shade. We go up to Settignano, on a hillside south of the city centre, and spend a morning under the pines in the garden of the beautiful Villa Gamberaia. We loiter in the cloisters of Santa Maria novella, contemplating the frescoes of St Dominic.
Though Florentine renaissance palaces turn blank faces to the street, inside they have secret courtyards and cool colonnades.
We eat lunch indoors — as the Italians do. Afternoons are for church-visiting or sleeping. Then the sun goes down, and like a canary whose cage has been uncovered, Florence is once again chirping, growing raucous over Aperol spritz.
Italians, renaissance or modern, know how to enjoy their country.