Alone Time

by Stephanie Rosenbloom

  I heard there was a secret chord

  That David played and it pleased the lord

  I wandered away from I Can Sing, looking at other works, like one by the fashion designer Hussein Chalayan, which used recordings of cries from seagulls—the city’s eternal residents, as he once put it. Still, I could hear “Hallelujah.” I went over to the chic Istanbul Modern café and restaurant at the far side of the floor and asked for a table on the deck along the water.

  From a rattan chair beside the Bosporus, across from the domes that bloom on the Golden Horn, I ordered a plate of homemade spinach and cheese ravioli. The waiter brought over a wire basket filled with toasted flatbreads and rolls, and a small bowl of spiced oil with black olives and fennel seeds. To my right, through the restaurant window, was a man eating by himself and writing in a notebook. To my left was the steel-blue Bosporus. The ships came and went, but the refrain remained.

  Hallelujah.

  * * *

  My last day in Istanbul there was an attack west of my hotel, at the Dolmabahçe Palace, part of the unrest between leftist militants and Turkish forces, news reports said. A grenade had been thrown; shots had been fired at the guards. The assailants, two men with an automatic weapon, ammunition, and hand grenades, had been arrested. No one had been killed.

  Five months later, a young Islamic State operative from Syria walked into the central historic district that’s home to the Blue Mosque and Cemberlitas hamam, and detonated a vest of explosives. Ten tourists were killed, and more than a dozen were wounded. It was the beginning of a wave of violence.

  Hours before the Dolmabahçe Palace attack, I was leaving my hotel. It was another warm, sunny morning. My taxi pulled out of the gates and within moments it was passing the Dolmabahçe Palace, the ferry terminal to Üsküdar, the Istanbul Modern.

  In the museum, next to the video where “Hallelujah” played, there was an installation titled Bring Yourself to Me (2009) by the artist Handan Borutecene. It was a jumble of brown chairs with African masks on them, suitcases once carried by migrants to France from Turkey, and magnifying glasses dating from 1890 through 1960. The chairs were from the Palais de la Porte Dorée in Paris, which has been home to various ethnological museums. Visitors were encouraged to use the magnifiers to examine the markings on the suitcases, and wall text explained that the piece was part of a meditation on how immigration can enrich a nation. Also on the wall was a reference to a poem by Rumi. “How good to migrate anew everyday,” the English translation said. “And how beautiful to settle anew everyday.”

  The taxi sped toward the airport, where I had arrived only a few days earlier. It was from a taxi that I would first and last see the Bosporus. It was glittering in the late afternoon sun on the day I landed. Shirtless sunbathers were stretched out on the seawalls. Every so often traffic came to a standstill, and wiry men descended onto the highway, weaving among the cars, selling water, roses, wooden bows and arrows, wheat stalks, car chargers, toy motorcycles, simit on platters miraculously balanced on their heads. When traffic began to move again, they receded like the tide.

  Now the road was leading away from the Istanbul Modern, away from the broken clock tower, the rainbow stairs, and the girl with the pink shirt in the quiet mosque on the Asia side of the Bosporus. “So many words that belong to yesterday,” said the Rumi poem. “Now we need to say new things.”

  In the coming months there would be terrorist attacks throughout Turkey: in tourist areas, at private celebrations, during sporting events. Yet they would be outnumbered by the days that were quiet and still. The bazaar opens its gates. The ferries zip back and forth.

  I thought about the people and places I had seen, and the many more I hadn’t, and hoped to one day see. And I thought about how we are lucky to catch whatever we can, for however long we have, in peace, under a blue sky, in late summer.

  PART III

  Fall

  Florence

  SILENCE

  Arrows and Angels

  Games for One

  Thou must be like a promontory of the sea, against which though the waves beat continually, yet it both itself stands, and about it are those swelling waves stilled and quieted.

  —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

  The path was edged with leaves, tawny, crisp, curled at the edges. The trees glowed yellow in the sunlight, like the farmhouses on the hillside. Were it not for the color of the foliage you could forget that it was autumn in Tuscany, that in a few hours the light and warmth would be gone and the wind would come and work its way into your spine as you hurry home over the dark river.

  You don’t think about this when you’re on a hill high above the old city of Florence, among parasol pines and cypress trees, on an October day that feels like June. From these heights, everything seems far away. Even the Duomo looks like a toy model.

  A few hours earlier I had been down on one of the city’s ancient streets, head cocked to get a look at the slender cross on Dante’s Church, when I was nearly clipped by a platoon of helmeted sightseers on Segways flying toward the Piazza della Signoria, where I later spotted them parked in front of the replica of the David as if it were the screen at a drive-in movie theater.

  Autumn used to be off-season in Florence. Henry James wrote of his “brilliant” October days there, when the “musing wanderer” had the town to himself and “the native population itself seemed scanty.” I was seeking some of that quietude—some dolce far niente, sweet idleness—in the early days of fall, the season of truffles and chestnuts, when people soak up the last warm hours in Adirondack chairs along the Arno, sipping wine at tables on the grass. Yet too often I found myself in an alley behind a band of tourists and a guide holding aloft a closed umbrella like a torch.

  Fewer places are truly off-season nowadays. And besides, Florence hasn’t historically been a place of peace. The streets around the Duomo used to have names like Death, Hell, and The Way of the Discontented, as Mary McCarthy writes in The Stones of Florence. At the Bargello, the Renaissance sculpture museum, people were executed. “In the lovely Piazza della Signoria,” as an itinerary card from my hotel described it, men were hanged, and the preacher Girolamo Savonarola was burned, like the cosmetics and books he denounced in the bonfires of the vanities. During the building of the Duomo, “from dawn to dusk the air rang with the blows of the blacksmith’s hammer and with the rumble of oxcarts and the shouting of orders,” as Ross King tells us in Brunelleschi’s Dome, his account of the colossal dome and its creator, Filippo Brunelleschi. (Brunelleschi himself isn’t getting much peace: I found his tomb behind bars, through an opening in a wall in the crowded gift shop of the Florence cathedral.)

  Before I climbed the hill, I’d been planning to spend a quiet day in the heart of the old city. But then I was nearly mowed down at Dante’s Church. At the Bargello, Michelangelo’s Bacchus was surrounded by museumgoers. Across the street at the Church of Santa Maria Assunta of the Badia Fiorentina, a tour group had formed a blockade across the stairs. And so I crossed the Santa Trinita bridge—rebuilt several times since the thirteenth century after being destroyed by floods and being blown up by German troops at the end of World War II—to commune with Autumn, one of four statues, first installed in the seventeenth century, that represent the seasons and stand guard at the corners of the bridge.

  Yet beneath Autumn’s bare feet, teenagers were walking every which way, cyclists frantically rang their bells, and Vespas and motorcycles whizzed by within inches of my toes. Almost all walkers in this town are “in danger of death,” as McCarthy noted. “If you step backward onto the pavement to look up at a palace, you will probably be run over.”

  I fled back across the bridge, past the men holding selfie sticks like fishing rods, asking “Selfie?” as you went by. I hurried past Primavera, the statue of Spring who lost her head after the German bombing. When the bridge was reopened in the 1950s, the statues of the seasons, in
cluding the headless Primavera, were returned to their posts. The Parker Pen Company offered $3,000 to anyone who could locate the head, according to the art historian Eve Borsook, though it wasn’t until 1961 that a dredging crew found it in the Arno. After a brief display on a red velvet cushion in the Palazzo Vecchio, Borsook wrote, “it was firmly replaced on the shoulders of La Primavera.” No one today would know her history but for the faint crack, like a necklace, surrounding her pale throat.

  I turned onto Lungarno degli Acciaiuoli, a busy road along the Arno, on my way to the Florence National Central Library, where I bounded up the stairs. At last: quiet.

  “No visitors,” said the woman behind the glass.

  Visits, as I would have known had I checked in advance, were by appointment only.

  Appointments are not necessary to get into the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana near the Piazza San Lorenzo, the library that houses works collected by the era’s leading humanists, but it, too, swells with visitors eager to see its unusual entrance hall staircase with elliptical steps designed by Michelangelo.

  Yet there was another place touched by Michelangelo that I suspected could offer some peace, one that I was certain wouldn’t require a reservation: the Porte Sante cemetery.

  The cemetery is on a hill above the old city, behind the Basilica of San Miniato, named for a third-century Christian martyr known as Saint Miniatus. Accused of being a heretic, Miniatus was beheaded, after which he is said to have picked up his decapitated head and walked from the Arno up into the hills to his hermitage. This is no easy task, even with one’s head intact.

  My walk from the old city began by crossing the Arno, where for centuries wool was washed, hides submerged, and marble floated from Carrera. On the Oltrarno, I passed under Porta di San Miniato, the old stone arch at the base of a hill, and went up Via del Monte alle Croci toward terraced steps that grew steeper and steeper, along a row of trees. What at first appeared to be a few thin trunks here and there turned out to be tall, plain crosses planted in the dirt. Chickens pecked the ground around them, their red combs twitching.

  As you ascend the steps, the narrow, gray streets give way to the dark green, velvet hillside, dotted with farmhouses the color of mustard, and stone fortifications designed by Michelangelo to protect Florence during the siege of 1529. When the stairs eventually end, you step up onto a curving sidewalk beneath tree boughs and street lamps, as black and slender as calligraphy. There are benches from which to take in the sweeping views of the city and the blue mountains that envelop it. You are, however, not quite at the basilica.

  San Miniato is perched on the hill on the opposite side of the road. I dashed across to avoid being hit by the cars that whip around the curve, climbing more stone steps, past balustrades, between manicured hedges and through rusted gates, to the top. Yet before going around back to the adjoining cemetery, I went inside the basilica, down into the candlelit crypt, where tourists were chatting beside a sign asking for silence. Florence is filled with “Silenzio!” signs, including an electric one in the Basilica of Santa Croce with the illuminated words SILENCE—RESPECT. That this needs to be spelled out in all caps and lit up like a sign for a twenty-four-hour diner in a basilica completed in the fourteenth century is an indication of what one is occasionally up against.

  Michelangelo is among the luminaries buried in Santa Croce. In life, he spent a good deal of time alone. Because he could withdraw comfortably into solitude, some people considered him arrogant; others thought he was bizarre, Ascanio Condivi, a fellow Florentine painter and his biographer, tells us. But he believed Michelangelo was neither. While his work made him solitary, Condivi said it “afforded him such delight and fulfillment that the company of others not only failed to satisfy him but even distressed him, as if it distracted him from his meditation.”

  Michelangelo often worked late, sometimes illuminating his workspace by attaching a candle to his hat. When sculpting the David, he had a wooden framework built around the marble slab so he could labor unseen.

  “No one should think it strange that Michelangelo loved solitude, for he was deeply in love with his art,” wrote the artist Giorgio Vasari in The Lives of the Artists, his wide-ranging account of the work of his friends and contemporaries, who also happened to include the likes of Brunelleschi, da Vinci, and Donatello. Both Vasari and Condivi tell us that it was not surprising but rather, necessary, that Michelangelo avoided companionship. “Anyone who wants to devote himself to the study of art must shun the society of others,” Vasari said. “In fact, a man who gives his time to the problems of art is never alone.”

  When a friend told Michelangelo that it was a shame that he wasn’t married, with sons who could inherit his works, Michelangelo replied, “I’ve always had only too harassing a wife in this demanding art of mine, and the works I leave behind will be my sons.” Creators and innovators, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, have long wrestled with the balance of work and relationships. Remember Darwin? Then there’s Keats, who told his brother and sister-in-law that he never wanted to marry, insisting, “My Happiness would not be so fine, as my Solitude is sublime,” though he did get engaged. Amelia Earhart was of like mind, writing to her future husband: “You must know again my reluctance to marry, my feeling that I shatter thereby chances in work which means most to me.”

  Like Santa Croce, San Miniato is a popular destination, not only for what’s inside the basilica but also for the panoramic vistas of Florence below. Visitors seem to spend as much if not more time photographing the city as exploring the basilica or the old graves on either side of its facade, some brightened with roses or strewn with candy. Fewer still go around back, up the hill, to the sprawling Porte Sante cemetery behind the bell tower, which Michelangelo lined with bales of wool and mattresses to protect from cannonballs during the siege. There, on a wooden bench in the sun or a shaded path between mausoleums, you can be alone among lovers sculpted in marble, winged angels that never take flight, and bronze busts of men turning green with age, casting shadows in the afternoon light.

  Some mausoleums are ornate, with colored marble and onion domes. Others are plain. One of the latter almost resembles a child’s drawing of a house, with a peaked roof and the number 37 on its stone face, the color of oysters. It sits along a stone and moss path near other drab crypts in a kind of condo development for the departed. When I arrived, its gates were wound with chains, and its curtains were closed. I would have breezed right by were it not for a white card dangling from a red ribbon tied to the gate. I flipped it over and saw a familiar face.

  Frankly, I thought there would be more cards—and flowers, too; maybe even toys. But there was just the card with a couple of holes punched in the corner for the red ribbon to slip through. The paper looked as if it had been faded by rain and bleached by sun. On it was a drawing of a boy with a long nose wearing a cone hat. Above him were two words so faint, it was as if they had been written by a ghost: “Padre Pinocchio.”

  The mausoleum is said to contain the remains of Carlo Collodi, a Florentine and the author of Pinocchio, though if you go looking for his resting place by that name, as I initially did, you won’t find him. He was born Carlo Lorenzini and is buried in the family mausoleum, where above the gates is the family name: LORENZINI.

  I was still holding the drawing when I heard voices approaching. I left and took a narrow path between mausoleums, across short, patchy grass, past empty planters black with grime, to tombs overlooking the Duomo. From this distance its burnt-orange bricks were the color of dying leaves. While it was being built, inhabitants of the area were evicted from their homes, and “the bones of long-dead Florentines were exhumed from their graves” to create a piazza beside the church, King tells us. It’s fitting, then, that some of the most striking views of the Duomo can be had while standing amid vaults and headstones.

  By now, the sun was going down. There’s probably an hour at which being alone in an ol
d cemetery goes from serene to spooky, but I didn’t care to find out precisely when it was. I took a final walk around before following a path out, past a church bulletin board, where hanging from a string on a yellow pushpin was a palm-sized Pinocchio, one tiny wooden arm raised as if waving hello.

  Or was it goodbye?

  * * *

  Something about the sign didn’t look right.

  Once again I had strayed from the heart of the old city, walking north toward the Rifredi railway station. I was on an ordinary street with what, at first blush, appeared to be an ordinary No Entry sign. But it was not, it turns out, so ordinary.

  Your run-of-the-mill Florentine No Entry sign is a red circle with a floating white bar. This one, upon closer inspection, had a stick figure, like the ones on construction work signs, hovering behind the white bar. In one of its tiny hands was a chisel, which it was using to sculpt the white bar as if it were a slab of marble. In the “marble” I could make out traces of a face: an eye, a nose, a mouth. The stick figure was carving a statue from the white slab, just as Michelangelo had sculpted the David. I couldn’t help but smile at this bit of whimsy: a wink to those who looked close enough to see it.

  But that wasn’t all. Nearby, the vertical white arrow of a One Way sign had also been reimagined. On top of the arrow point, someone had added a white circle signifying a head. And above the circle was a halo—so that the skyward-pointing arrow resembled an angel in a white robe.

  On a yellow-and-black construction sign, a stick figure worker now had a ball and chain shackled to his ankle. A few blocks away, a red and blue No Parking sign was partly covered in black webbing that looked as if it had been shot there by Spider-Man.