On a directional sign, the horizontal arrow had been altered so that it dissolved into daisies.
These doctored street signs were as plentiful as wildflowers. I found them on the way out of the old city, near the Piazza della Indipendenza, where people relaxed on benches in their fall coats. I found them along twisted gnarls of railroad tracks and on the other side of a low, graffitied tunnel on the way to the hills of Montughi, to the Robert Baden Powell garden, and to the Frederick Stibbert Museum. The Stibbert is the opulent former home of a nineteenth-century financier and his collection of armory from the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries, which features a cavalcade hall with rows of horses and statues of men in armor.
But I was more interested in a man named Clet Abraham, the French street artist who lives in Florence and cleverly uses stickers to turn arrows into angels and No Entry sign bars into sculptures. It’s hardly the sort of art you expect to seek out in a city of Renaissance masterpieces. But then, all those masterpieces can wear you out.
Stendhal, the nineteenth-century author of The Red and the Black, reportedly saw so much breathtaking art in Florence that he felt faint. He isn’t alone. Faintness—not to mention sweating, depression or euphoria, or having hallucinations—has been so common among tourists in Florence that when Graziella Magherini was the chief of psychiatry at the city’s Santa Maria Nuova Hospital, she dubbed it the “Stendhal Syndrome.”
“The Stendhal Syndrome occurs most frequently in Florence, because we have the greatest concentration of Renaissance art in the world,” Magherini once told Metropolis M magazine. “People seldom see just a single work, but overload themselves with hundreds of masterpieces in a short period.”
The condition is controversial; it doesn’t appear in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. But afflicted or not, spying a Clet Abraham on the street after a day of sightseeing is like being served a cool limoncello. Although his works were throughout the city, few people seemed to notice them. Indeed, many of the objects and talismans I’ve “found” while traveling—the mystery book in the garden in Paris, euro coins, hacked road signs—were not actually hidden. They were there in plain sight, waiting to be seen. To borrow a phrase from the poet Gary Snyder, solitude endows us with a kind of “power-vision” that heightens the senses and raises alertness to everyday things that can be all too easy to overlook.
As tour groups streamed by, I went Easter egg hunting for more of Abraham’s signs. Whenever I found one, I stopped to admire it while people pushed past me, as if neither I nor the sign were there. It was like being in a museum and having the artworks to myself. And in this unexpected way, on street corners and under lamplights, I found a kind of solitude despite the throngs.
Scouting for signs reminded me of the game that was a regular feature in the magazine Highlights for Children, in which you had to search for objects hidden among illustrations of everyday scenes; of looking for the name “Nina” disguised within Al Hirschfeld’s caricatures in the Sunday New York Times; of a “found things” grade-school homework assignment that required each of us to go off with a grown-up to hunt down objets trouvés on the streets. These sorts of quests take on new meaning as an adult. You can make up your own games (like tracking down Parisian sphinxes or Clet Abraham signs) or project, like the photographer Stefan Draschan’s series “People Sleeping in Museums,” featuring visitors catnapping amid artworks. Or pick up something like the “Anywhere Travel Guide,” a deck of seventy-five cards, each containing an instruction, like “Start walking until you see something particularly yellow. Notice this something,” or “If you can see a shop from where you are, step inside it. Ask someone there where to go next.”
One Anywhere card directs you to follow a stranger. This, it so happens, is something da Vinci used to do. He was in the habit of spending entire days following men and women he considered to be striking, particularly anyone with a “strange head of hair or beard,” according to Vasari. Later, da Vinci would draw the person from memory.
In 1969, the performance artist Vito Acconci trailed strangers on foot around New York City for as long as the person remained in a public space. (While it sounds supremely creepy, it’s considered one of Acconci’s most notable works.) Each day for about a month, Acconci chose someone and followed him or her through the streets of New York, exploring ideas about public and private space, chronicling his wanderings with notes and photos. The “following” ended when the person went into a private space.
In the 1980s, the French conceptual artist Sophie Calle surreptitiously followed and photographed strangers on the streets of Paris simply for the pleasure of it. At one point at a gathering she met a man whom she had followed earlier in the day. “During the course of our conversation, he told me he was planning an imminent trip to Venice,” she wrote in her book Suite Vénitienne. “I decided to follow him.” She then hopped a train to Italy, where, disguised in a blond wig, she dined alone, followed and photographed the unsuspecting man (known in the book as Henri B.), and kept time-stamped notes about his movements through Venice. She got careless—or allowed herself to become careless—and was eventually discovered. But Henri B. was a good sport about it, and was apparently more flattered than fearful. Calle tried to photograph him during their meeting but he raised a hand to hide his face. He had his own rules.
Acconci (whose Twitter biography once read “Vito Acconci is now following you on Twitter”) described himself as “a situation maker.” Alone, you can be one, too, designing your own game. With its carnival atmosphere—the carousels and hidden passageways; the costume helmets and armor you can try on at the Stibbert Museum; the sculptures and fountains you slip coins into for good luck—Florence lends itself to this sort of playfulness.
* * *
That evening, I returned to the Savoy. A boutique hotel in a grand old building that dates to the 1890s, it had pale rooms with high ceilings, parquet floors, and large windows that looked onto the Duomo or the Piazza della Repubblica, the square that was once the site of the Roman forum and the Jewish ghetto. It was also the backdrop to Ruth Orkin’s 1951 photo of a solo woman traveler, American Girl in Italy, which would appear in Cosmopolitan magazine with a feature titled “Don’t Be Afraid to Travel Alone.” The Savoy has since undergone extensive renovations but at the time, my room was an elegantly spare retreat. I padded barefoot across the smooth wood herringbone floor to the wide window and let in the hum of the piazza below. The evening pantomime was under way: young people standing in small circles, smoking, talking about some intrigue or other, filing in and out of a restaurant serving pizza and wine. This is the beauty of old European buildings; they’re high enough to have crow’s nests but not so high that you’re isolated from the rhythms of the street. I leaned out. On one side of the piazza was Gilli, a café and pastry shop that’s been in Florence in one spot or another since 1733; at the far side of the piazza was an Apple store. I left the window open and took my laptop into bed to write.
Within the hour my eyes were fluttering closed. I got up and returned to the window. The piazza was still full as I reached for the shutters. The bit of effort required to swing them open and closed marked the beginning and end of each day with casual ceremony. It was far more satisfying than brushing aside a curtain or tugging a cord. To throw open the shutters was to invite in the morning. To close them with a soft thud was to acknowledge the passing of another day.
I pulled them toward my chest, lifted one silver latch and then the other, and quieted the city.
Alone with Venus
On Seeing
I spent three hours this morning principally in the contemplation of the Niobe, and of a favourite Apollo; all worldly thoughts and cares seem to vanish . . .
—Percy Bysshe Shelley in a letter to Mrs. Shelley from Florence, 1821
No one was standing in front of The Birth of Venus. It was just me and the goddess
with the auburn hair.
I had shuffled through the Uffizi Gallery’s metal detectors with the Saturday morning crowd, walked up the staircase, through the corridors with the painted ceilings, into a room of Botticellis—and not a soul was there. On the wall, as if hanging over someone’s living room couch, was Botticelli’s fifteenth-century masterwork: the goddess of love in a scallop shell, just off the shores of Cyprus. It was the very image so often slapped on anything that can be sold in a museum bookshop—T-shirts, tote bags, calendars, keychains—not to mention featured on the national side of the Italian ten euro cent. Despite the fame of one of his best-known works, Botticelli is said to have been so poor in his old age that he would have died of hunger had not deep-pocketed friends like Lorenzo de’ Medici come to his aid. I approached the painting cautiously, concerned, as usual, that I had strayed into some off-limits area. But no alarms sounded, and no one rushed in to warn me away. I was alone with one of the most famous women in the world.
I wish I could say, as I stood at Venus’s feet that morning, that I allowed eye and mind to wander slowly over the ripples of the blue-green sea she floated in on, the pink roses tumbling in the wind, her long strands of hair, the folds of the cloak about to be draped around her naked shoulders. Yet instead—I put my iPhone between us and began taking photos.
It is rare, seemingly impossible really, to have the opportunity to view a masterpiece under such conditions. You generally can’t so much as glance at Venus, or the Mona Lisa, without also seeing the back of someone’s head or hearing an audio tour spilling from a stranger’s headset. I wasn’t in some small museum, like the Horne. The Uffizi is notorious for its long lines, congested galleries, and pickpockets. And there I was, alone with Venus, taking photo after photo like some paparazzo. But by the time I realized what I was doing it was too late—footsteps sounded in the hall. I’d been given the gift of privacy, silenzio, in one of the most magnificent and unlikely places. And I squandered it.
What had I been trying to achieve? Susan Sontag wrote that photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, of making it “an exotic prize to be tracked down and captured by the diligent hunter-with-a-camera.”
Sometimes, the hunter is clumsy. In 2017, when a woman visiting an exhibition at Factory in Los Angeles tried to take a selfie, she fell onto an installation and ruined $200,000 worth of art. (Many people have also been injured, some fatally, while absorbed in getting the perfect shot. In 2016, researchers found that 127 people had died while trying to take selfies since March 2014.) Yet even in 1977, before the Instagram age, Sontag observed that the camera was a crutch for the traveler, one that made having an experience “identical with taking a photograph of it.”
By trying to keep the moment forever, I’d denied myself the immediacy of the experience of the painting as well as the quiet gallery. And, as I would later learn, that’s the sort of thing that may affect not only the moment, but the memory of the moment, too. Linda A. Henkel, a psychology professor at Fairfield University in Connecticut, calls this the “photo-taking impairment effect.” In her experiments, participants took a guided tour of a museum that housed paintings, sculptures, pottery, tools, jewels, and mosaics. The participants were told to simply observe some objects and to photograph others. Henkel’s findings, published in Psychological Science, revealed that photographing the objects in their entirety diminished people’s memory of them. Participants who did so, as opposed to just observing the work, remembered fewer objects and fewer details about those objects. They relied on the camera, Henkel said, “to ‘remember’ for them.”
There was, however, an exception to this finding. When participants zoomed in to photograph a particular part of an object, such as a statue’s feet or a painting’s sky, its memory was retained. The extra attention and thought involved in focusing and zooming in on part of the object seemed to eliminate the impairment effect.
Studies that explore how photo-taking does or doesn’t affect memory have had seemingly conflicting results. Subsequent research published in 2017 in Psychological Science found that taking photos aided visual memory but hurt auditory memory. After conducting four studies, professors at New York University’s Stern School of Business, USC’s Marshall School of Business, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and the Yale School of Management concluded that “even when people don’t take a photo of a particular object, like a sculpture, but have a camera with them and the intention to take photos, they remember that sculpture better than people who did not have a camera with them.”
Whatever the latest research finds, few of us are going to stop taking photos, even those who are uninterested in posting minute-by-minute accounts of our trips on social media. There is pleasure in the process, in composing a shot, of seeing differently. “When I’m on my own with my camera . . . it feels as if I am in a room of my own, a self-contained world,” Patti Smith said in an interview for Camera Solo, the catalogue that accompanied an exhibition of her photographs at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut. On the road, I like photographing fellow solitary travelers. There’s something joyful in the woman sitting on a wall along the Arno, scribbling in a notebook; the man lying on his stomach on a bench with a book in the garden of the Rodin Museum in Paris; the woman sunbathing beside the Seine.
Yet for many of us, our cameras are also our phones. And that’s where we may run into trouble, because a smartphone can so easily undermine savoring. “If you are doing this,” as Fran Lebowitz said while making texting motions with her thumbs in the Martin Scorsese documentary Public Speaking, “that’s where you are.”
According to one study, the average adult checks his or her phone thirty times a day, while the average millennial checks his or her phone more than 150 times a day. I can barely stand to keep my phone in a bag on my shoulder. I might want to get directions, find a coffee shop, listen to a podcast, or answer my editor’s texts. Admittedly, I sometimes use my phone to make notes while walking, joining the ranks of the so-called smartphone zombies.
Little wonder that people around the world are taking Internet Sabbaths, turning off their devices to return to themselves. In the United States, Reboot, a group inspired by Jewish traditions, organizes a phone-free “National Day of Unplugging.” Hotels as varied as the Renaissance Pittsburgh and the Mandarin Oriental have at one point or another offered “digital detox vacations” that encouraged guests to hand over their smartphones. Intrepid Travel, a group tour company with headquarters in Melbourne, Australia, has offered digital detox tours—“exclusive departures where there’ll be no social media and no cellphones. For real”—to places like Morocco and India. Forever Resorts, which offers rental houseboats at lakes and national parks across the United States, featured an “unplugging ceremony” during which guests gathered around a lockbox to impound their mobile phones. Marriott and Renaissance Caribbean & Mexico Resorts rolled out “Braincation,” tech-free zones at nine properties across the Caribbean and Mexico.
In 2017, an entire country took action when France introduced a “right to disconnect” law that gives workers the legal right to ignore work emails when they are not on the clock. Texts, messages, and emails “colonize the life of the individual to the point where he or she eventually breaks down,” as Benoît Hamon, a former French education minister, stated.
Even some of the designers of the technology are turning off notifications on their smartphones and using Internet and app blockers like Freedom to reclaim their time (more on that in the Tips and Tools section of this book). For example, Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, created the Center for Humane Technology, which advocates for and spurs the creation of technology that’s not distracting and addictive.
As my iPhone and I were entering the crimson Room of Michelangelo and the Florentine Painters, a family was just leaving. I found myself alone again, this time with a statue of a reclining Cleopatra and with the Holy Family in the
vibrant panel painting Doni Tondo. The Uffizi on that autumn morning seemed to exist only for me. A guard was seated on a chair, head leaning back against the wall, snoring as I walked across the gilded neoclassical room ringed with marble statues that tell the story of the myth of Niobe, a noblewoman who boasted that she had more children than Leto, the mother of Apollo and Artemis. (Things didn’t go well for Niobe after that; her many sons and daughters were killed.)
On the Uffizi’s rooftop terrace, where visitors can look out over the city and the battlements of the Palazzo Vecchio, there were only two people, and they were sitting on a bench in silence. It’s one thing to occasionally find yourself alone in, say, the Bargello in the majolica room, even in the Mary Magdalene Chapel with the crucifix attributed to Michelangelo. Or, after waiting for tour groups to pass, inside the silent Badia Fiorentina. But that morning in the Uffizi was extraordinary.
No one was in front of the Bronzinos. In a nearby room, I walked right up to da Vinci’s Annunciation and Baptism of Christ. Next, I was face-to-face with Medusa, the Caravaggio parade shield that inspired Vik Muniz’s Medusa Marinara, 1999. The shield was decorated with her severed head, mouth agape, writhing serpents for hair, blood spurting from her neck. Now this was a formidable Medusa.
There was more blood and gore nearby at Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes, and another Caravaggio, The Sacrifice of Isaac. It was a bit much for a Saturday morning. I preferred the romance of another Venus—Titian’s Venus of Urbino, a voluptuous nude reclining on a white-sheeted divan, a hand lazily resting on the V between her legs.
We, too, were alone. For as long I dared to stare at her, she stared back, “unashamed,” as the text beside the painting said, with her luminous nudity, the white curve of her belly; herself.
Alone Time Page 13
