Allegra Pazzi: Dr. Fell, do you believe a man could become so obsessed with a woman, from a single encounter?
Hannibal Lecter: Could he daily feel a stab of hunger for her and find nourishment in the very sight of her? I think so. But would she see through the bars of his plight and ache for him?
–Ridley Scott’s Hannibal (2001)
Unhinged is how the city felt to me as I walked back to my car, a quickstep too fast, along via Romana at one in the morning. The dimly lit street, hemmed in by towering palazzi on either side, narrowing and less trodden than during daylight hours. It’s a long walk back to the Oltrarno main parking lot for a woman alone after midnight.
That haunting soundtrack “Vide Cor Meum” began to play in my mind, a sonnet-made-operatic song composed for Florence, based on Dante’s “La Vita Nuova”. A wistful, soul-stirring accompaniment first served up in Ridley Scott’s Hannibal, as Anthony Hopkins licks his lips at the luscious delights of the Pazzi Chapel, a place as prophetic as it is pacifying. That same uneasy feeling sped up my step in the early hours along the street I had strode countless times. The feeble lamps jutting forth on their centuries-old wrought iron brackets, the absence of human company, the ominous Corsi foliage: this was Florence at her most unnerving, the Florence of Lecter himself.
A disquieting departure from the voguish Oltrarno of apericene and after-dinner amaro, a neighbourhood where one lingers and lounges and longs to remain, in that instant of corridor-bound eeriness I wanted none other than to get the hell out of town. For the first time in 15 years, Florence felt like a stranger to me. But perhaps it’s not the long, south-leading street’s fault; perhaps the solecism lies with me, retribution for my crime of abandonment. I fell in love, and I fell in love, you see. First with Florence, a slow-burning, aching infatuation, and then with my husband, an enduring, transformative journey, which stole me away from my first love, out of the city on the daily commute of marriage.
Although we are never apart for long, Florence and me, our relationship has turned part-time, a product of non-cohabitation, a sort of nine-to-five rapport with peaks and troughs. These days, while we no longer live together, we see one another more deeply, more darkly; we see face to face and eye and eye. Her secrets and her wrinkles are my daily bread.
Nocturnal strolls in the Oltrarno, once a normal activity when I lived my fidanzata years in borgo della Stella, are now a strange rarity, an afterhours oddity to this out-of-towner who does Florence in diurnal range. The girl on the train at 08.41 and, only if the party’s very good, 23.08.
