I returned to the UK to pack and was back in Florence within seventy-two hours, ready to settle into a small hotel on the banks of the River Arno, which the school financed for a month, allowing me time to find an apartment. The hotel’s name was hardly original: Hotel Arno, a basic hotel that offered me their smallest room at the front, but it did have a tiny balcony overlooking the main road, above which two enormous flags stretched out across the pavement below: the Italian tricolour and the European Union flags. My first impression of the room was mixed. The tap water smelt unpleasant and although perfectly safe to drink, its taste and smell reminded me of the gas that oozed from the Bunsen burners in secondary school science labs in the sixties: I concluded it was something to do with the purification process. The shower in the ‘compact’ bathroom was temperamental and the towels had the consistency of a thin linen tablecloth! Drying off was irksome, as these extraordinary sheets of cloth appeared to be stubbornly non-absorbent! The bed was a small single affair, but I spent only a little time in it and when I did, I was regularly disturbed by noise from Reception below, the amplified voices spiralling up the staircase. My room was at the top of the staircase on the first floor allowing me to hear every word spoken, as men and women arrived and left the hotel at all hours. The walls of my room offered little protection from the amorous shrieks of those engaged in nocturnal gymnastics in adjacent rooms: rooms by the hour?

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  Opposite the Hotel Arno, was one of many small parks and recreational facilities where, at 5.00 p.m. each evening, mothers and children appeared in droves. While the children played football or roller-skated, the mothers would chatter, gesticulating with wild sweeps of the arms, at the adjacent bar which operated from within a dingy kiosk sporting a string of fairy lights around the servery. This was the same bar which, throughout the course of the evening, attracted an array of misfits, loners and vagrants, some of whom would hang around and mumble incoherently to themselves: some old enough to have lived through Mussolini’s tortuous reign. Perhaps it was that alone which had inflicted this interminable misery upon them! Parents, as they gossiped and swapped news with one another, ignored those tormented souls in their midst, choosing instead to focus on their children. These ghosts of the night knew very well that any approach made by them upon the children would unleash the dogs of hell at the hands of the Italian mothers.

 

Immediately above the park, at the same time each evening, another social gathering took place: a gathering of small birds, thousands of them, creating a dreadful din within the leafy canopy above, while dropping their mess indiscriminately on those unfortunates below. It was nothing like the problem in Rome, however, where to this day there is an ongoing battle with starlings, millions of them performing their magnificent airborne show each evening: the murmuration.

‘Murmuration?’ I hear you murmur.

Have you ever viewed and wondered at the floating, graceful black lace veil of squadrons of starlings flying in perfect formation high above, for example, the ruins of the West Pier in Brighton at sundown? The technical term for this spectacle is a murmuration. In Rome, it is a magnificent sight but the ornithological excrement (the guano) rains down in torrents upon the citizens of the capital and upon their vehicles. Cars end up looking like four-wheel, badly-iced wedding cakes, while all around the streets the council’s bird-scaring agents, suitably dressed in haz suits and masks, bearing weapons of mass destruction, seek to scare off these stars of a certain Hitchcock film. The ‘weapons’ employed to scare them emit a series of high-pitched screams designed to disperse the clouds of birds floating over the Italian capital. This, they accomplish with limited success, for although the starlings are dispersed over a large area of the capital, they are never completely eliminated from the city and re-form quickly. At best, they are moved to another part of the city where the bombing campaign recommences until the council's agents are mobilised again. This game of cat and mouse is played out each evening in Rome.

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  The twilight meeting of mothers in the park was a ritual practised all over the city, and the comune, (pronounced com-yew-nay) the local council, facilitated this daily social ceremony most generously by ensuring that there was a plethora of available parks and green spaces throughout Florence. One of the residents explained why it was so important to families.

“Look around you,” he said, “and what do you see? You see only streets of apartments and much traffic, so where do the children play, eh? How can parents meet? Very few properties in this city have gardens.”

What he said made perfect sense and that led me to consider the many piazzas throughout this beautiful city. I learnt subsequently that they had been created to fulfil a number of important functions. First, they served as wide-open spaces where people could interact socially and exchange information. Second, they were used, centuries ago, to muster and assemble the troops at times of conflict, and finally, they were areas where trade took place, much as market squares provide to this day throughout Europe. At the weekend, it is not unusual to see piazzas in full trading mode in Florence, offering a wonderful way to spend the weekend strolling among the various stalls exhibiting a wide variety of merchandise and antiques. There was an extraordinary variety of items for sale: books, gardening implements, ceramics, silverware, paintings, prints, figurines and antique furniture adorned the stallholders’ tables.