Walking

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During lunch, PG was complaining to the saintly and supremely-patient Mrs. PG about the shut-in world of Covid. We talked about how much we really missed walking.

As a general proposition, PG loves to walk around cities. He enjoys walking in the country, forest, etc., but he grew up in places where non-urban walking was the only option. When he was first on his own in a large city, Chicago, he loved to walk, sometimes during the day and sometimes at night.

Chicago taught country-boy PG that some city places change their character at night, but, fortunately, he avoided any consequences other than becoming exceedingly uncomfortable and quickly reversing his path to return to a better locale.

However, PG digresses.

While PG has had many wonderful experiences walking around American cities, his two most-favorite cities in which to walk are located in Italy – Florence and Venice. (Oxford would rank #3, so it’s not all about Italy. He further casts no shade on Paris, London, Amsterdam or Athens.)

Among the digital files scattered through the darkness amid the spider webs of PG’s hard drives, here is a photo from Florence.

Florence is full of many spectacular architectural and artistic treasures, but, on the theme of walking through a city, PG took this photo early in the morning while wandering around.

This was on a little square not far from the Basilica di Santo Spirito and the Arno River, which runs through the center of the oldest part of Florence, often regarded as the birthplace of the Renaissance.

On the right, you can see a bit of an open air restaurant, in the process of being set up for the day. The man bending over appears to be the owner of the restaurant and the other man, standing beside a small truck seems to be waiting, perhaps for the manager to sign a receipt for various food items that the waiting driver has just delivered to the kitchen.

One of the wooden doors on the left is the entrance to a small shop located next to the restaurant and the other appears to lead to stairs going up to two or more floors of apartments above the restaurant.

Behind the bent-over man, you’ll see another man in a white undershirt who has the look of a cook, standing in a doorway leading into the main restaurant, checking out the scene on the square prior to beginning a long day’s work in a hot kitchen.

The sidewalk, built from stones, has been freshly washed, perhaps by the restaurant owner or maybe the cook, in preparation for later in the day when servers bringing various hot meals from the kitchen to outside diners under the awnings will be dodging through crowds of shoppers, locals and tourists.

Above the sidewalk, you’ll observe some spontaneous power lines reaching from the restaurant to the covered outdoor dining area. In the United States, those might be buried, but few sidewalks in the US are made from thick stones.

Looking further into the distance, on the right, above the awnings, you see a typical Florentine apartment building. Down the street, an Italian Lotto sign, a couple of bicycles and a line of cars jammed onto a narrow Florentine street built of stone long before automobiles were even imagined. Behind the cars, you’ll see an old residence with typical Italian shutters that may well have been built in the 17th century.

In the far distance, you see a line of Tuscan Cypress trees typical of any part of Florence where there is room for landscaping.

You can see these Tuscan Cypress trees in the following image of Florence, created by Alessandro Cecchini during the 1700’s.