Alone Time

by Stephanie Rosenbloom

  KNOWLEDGE

  The Secret Corridor

  Schooling Yourself

  You can have no dominion greater or less than that over yourself.

  —Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci

  One end of the corridor begins behind locked doors in the walls of the Uffizi, zags across the Ponte Vecchio and over the Arno, through the top of the Santa Felicita church, and into the Pitti Palace, about half a mile away. It was built in the 1500s for Francesco I de’ Medici and Joanna of Austria, which enabled the Medici to walk in privacy and safety between their offices in the Uffizi and their palace in the Boboli Gardens. (Safety was a legitimate concern: In 1478, members of the Pazzi family conspired to end the Medici rule by killing the brothers Lorenzo and Giuliano during Mass, according to Machiavelli’s account; Giuliano did not survive.)

  The outline of the corridor, with its small, caged windows, can be seen from the Ponte Vecchio, above the little ocher shops that cling to it like barnacles. From its windows you can watch tourists on the old bridge, shopping for gloves and gold, unaware of your eyes on them as they take selfies along the Arno. This is fitting: The walls of the hidden corridor are lined with self-portraits from the Uffizi’s collection, some of the oldest in the world.

  The corridor is named for its creator, Giorgio Vasari, who is hardly a household name even though he designed, or helped design, some of the most iconic churches and palaces in Florence. Nearly every book about Renaissance art, or block of wall text in a museum in Florence, includes his name. “Vasari tells us the story,” begins the text beside Donatello’s tomb. “A fact mentioned by Vasari,” reads a sign at the Bargello about the discovery of a portrait of Dante by Giotto. “According to Vasari,” says another in the Reading Room at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana. The city is so filled with references to Vasari that, as with sphinxes in Paris, a traveler can make a game of counting the number of times his name is encountered in the course of a day.

  The ubiquity of Vasari’s name is largely due to his having written The Lives of the Artists, the source of much (occasionally embellished and inadvertently incorrect) art history of the period. Were blogs around in his time, Vasari would have been the must-read insider, posting about jealousies (such as Donatello’s annoyance at Brunelleschi’s criticism of his carving of a Christ) and rivalries (da Vinci versus Michelangelo!) of his age. He would have had regular posts about Botticelli’s pranks (Botticelli once altered a painting to fool an apprentice into thinking he was seeing things that weren’t there) and an exclusive about an incident in which the goldsmith Francesco Francia was shown a statue of Julius by Michelangelo and proceeded to compliment its bronze casting rather than its craftsmanship. Michelangelo quipped: “I owe as much to Pope Julius who gave me the bronze as you owe to the chemists who give you your colors for painting.” Michelangelo concluded, Vasari tells us, by calling Francia a fool.

  Vasari’s own work can be seen in Florence’s most popular sites. He had a hand in details of the Santa Croce, Santa Maria Novella, San Lorenzo, and Ognissanti churches. He worked on grottoes for the Boboli Gardens, helped complete the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, and designed Michelangelo’s tomb, as well as a little building known as the Uffizi.

  In 1966, during one of the worst floods in the history of Florence, hundreds of Renaissance masterworks and library collections were submerged. Vasari’s The Last Supper was underwater for more than twelve hours and took half a century to finally be restored and reinstalled in Santa Croce. Paula Deitz, the editor of the Hudson Review, called it “the main event” of the city’s 2016 anniversary commemorations. She had been in Florence during the flood with her future husband, the editor and poet Frederick Morgan, and wrote fifty years later that Vasari’s five-panel painting was “the final, most complex, severely damaged masterpiece in the flood to be restored.”

  This history, these stories, were among the things I read about in the sweet anticipatory hours before my trip, and in the months that came after. I looked at maps, photos, and paintings by Raphael, Caravaggio, and Botticelli, who, I learned, painted other versions of his auburn-haired Venus in which she was alone, unaccompanied by winds or Graces. I read in Horace Walpole’s letter about coining the word “serendipity” that he had received a portrait of the Grand Duchess Bianca Capello—painted by Vasari. And, of course, I read Vasari. I read Machiavelli, Dante, and da Vinci, too, giving myself the art history class I always wished I’d taken.

  Da Vinci himself was mostly self-taught. Just skim his notebooks and you’ll see how he brought a spirit of investigation and cross-pollination into everyday life, in observations and instructions about painting, geography, zoology, anatomy, and astronomy. (His notebooks are available for free online, including at Gutenberg.org, and can be used as a model for creating your own notebooks about whatever topics interest you.)

  In addition to thoughts about when and where to study, and how to practice and learn, da Vinci wrote notes to himself about a startling variety of subjects he wanted to understand: “Learn to work flesh colours in tempera,” said one. “Learn levelling and how much soil a man can dig out in a day,” said another. Perhaps his way of thinking is best summed up by one of the notebook headings: “How something may be learnt everywhere.”

  While a certain amount of our happiness is genetically predetermined, some measure of it is within our control, and one of the things we can do to maximize the latter, Sorja Lyubomirsky has found, is to “learn until the day you die.”

  Learning new things goes hand in hand with what positive psychologists call engagement, an element of well-being that can ultimately lead to what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called “flow.” Flow involves that sensation of total absorption in an activity like painting or playing music, the feeling that “clock time” has disappeared. You’re in the zone and nothing else—sleep, food, body aches—can distract your focus. Csikszentmihalyi reached that conclusion after he and his colleagues spent years interviewing all sorts of creative people, including painters, scientists, and mountain climbers. Beethoven’s circle had their own word for the composer’s experience of flow: “raptus.” In his biography of the composer, Jan Swafford describes raptus as a withdrawal into a profound trance. “Alone in rooms, alone in nature, alone in his raptus, Beethoven was happiest and always would be.”

  Learning is part of the joy of travel. Learning about the Vasari corridor, for instance, was easy and affordable. Actually gaining admission to the Vasari corridor was less so. You couldn’t just show up and go at your own pace; you had to be part of a tour. The Uffizi offered a limited number of tickets (not included in the price of museum admission), but even weeks before my trip, the tours were sold out. And so I ended up buying a $75 ticket through Viator.com, which offered tours by local guides throughout the world. (Note: The process of visiting the Vasari corridor, even the art on display inside, may be changing. The director of the Uffizi proposed renovating the corridor, opening it to more visitors, and moving some of its paintings elsewhere. The Uffizi is undergoing renovations in other areas, too—it has already reorganized its Botticelli rooms—to help alleviate overcrowding. And easier online booking directly through the museum is up and running.)

  My tour group was instructed to meet on a side street outside the Uffizi. Most of us had gathered early and signed in with clipboard-carrying organizers. Half of us would go into the corridor first, and the other half would follow. We were standing in the street, waiting to begin, when a few women arrived and told one of the organizers that one member of their party was running late. Could the rest of us wait? they asked. For reasons that were unclear, the organizer then asked us all if anyone traveling alone would be willing to volunteer to join the group that would depart later.

  I was scheduled to meet John, a friend and fellow flâneur who was working for the New York Times in London, for lunch immediately after the tour in a nearby piazza.

  Be
fore I ever traveled alone, I traveled with John. He was my solo travel training wheels. After all, we aren’t necessarily born good travelers; we learn to be them. And John was being one with savoir vivre, traveling alone extensively for work and pleasure, all the while using points and miles to get upgraded to business class, and into airport lounges and better hotels. We first met at the Times, before he became the editor of a travel-themed section called “Escapes.”

  When you’re alone, John said, there’s no performance anxiety about making everyone in the group happy. For instance, while in Osaka, he decided to eat at a katsu counter instead of waiting for a table—something he would not have done if he were entertaining others. Alone, he could make last-minute decisions about how to spend an afternoon, or simply abandon a museum if the exhibition didn’t grab him. “The defining word,” he said, “is ‘freedom.’”

  In the case of the Vasari corridor tour, I didn’t have the freedom of time. The tour was already running late, which would mean that if I offered to switch groups, I would keep John waiting in a piazza even longer than he already would have to be.

  Being requested to switch seats or groups is familiar ground for solo travelers. There are all kinds of reasons travelers, solo or not, desire certain seats. We may have a tight connection, so a place near the exit is crucial. We may have a business meeting and know a particular seat will give us a better chance at some shut-eye. We may be anxious fliers and find one spot less stressful than another. We may have mental or physical limitations; not all disabilities are visible. Maybe we just like looking out the window. For some travelers, the view from 35,000 feet is one of life’s great romantic pleasures, and a treasured part of a once-a-year vacation.

  Most people want to be helpful. A survey about airline etiquette from Travel Leaders Group, one of the largest traditional travel agencies in the United States, asked travelers: “If you were flying alone and a couple or family asked you to switch seats so that they could sit together, what would you do?” Most said they would move. Whether they actually would do so is another matter—people’s good intentions do not necessarily match up with their actions—but let’s take them at their word. The second most popular answer was that they would move—but only if the new seat wasn’t a middle seat.

  Finding no willing volunteers, the tour organizer announced it was time to go.

  We were led to a hallway in the Uffizi in front of two tall wooden doors with red push-bars and a box that suggested that they were an emergency exit. Most visitors, myself included, would have wandered right by them. A man in a suit and tie stood in front of the doors while our guide, a professor, handed out listening devices. After some fiddling with wires and some more standing around and waiting, the man in the suit began to unlock the doors. People raised their smartphones to film the reveal as if we had just heard the opening bars of a rock concert.

  When the doors parted I could see beyond them a drab staircase leading down and a curved ceiling painted with imaginary beasts. I adjusted the volume on the device in my ear. A guard motioned in our direction, and we moved forward into the mouth of the tunnel, inside the walls of the Uffizi, the doors closing behind us.

  “Stay in the center,” warned a guard.

  If someone moved a little too close to a portrait or lingered too long in one spot, she would snap at him or her in Italian, uncrossing her arms just long enough to wave them, lending the tour the air of a fifth-grade class trip. When the guard wasn’t doing either of these things, she was tapping the screen of her smartphone or hugging herself as if she had a perpetual chill.

  The halls were lined with gold frames. Hundreds of eyes watched from the walls, from portraits by Andrea del Sarto, Giovanni Domenico Ferretti, Marc Chagall, and women artists absent from the main halls of the Uffizi. Here: Thérèse Schwartze. There: Rosalba Carriera.

  Now and then the guard looked up from her phone long enough to remind us to keep moving along. Another tour group was behind us, and one a few feet ahead. We were like floats in a parade, each with its own watchful minder. We followed the professor—who had the thick curls of Michelangelo’s David, and was wearing jeans, a blazer, and a knotted scarf with fringe at its end—across the Ponte Vecchio. Round, caged windows offered postcard views of the Arno, the city’s terra-cotta roofs and old yellow buildings with pale blue shutters.

  After the corridor crosses over the river it runs through the top of the church of Santa Felicita, where a private box opposite the altar allowed the Medicis to attend Mass high above the worshippers.

  If you were lucky, and if your guard was feeling charitable, at the end of the corridor you might get the nod to ascend a flight of steps and spend a few minutes—no more—in a secret room. Incredibly, our guard allowed us to do so.

  The sound of our shoes on the steps echoed through the halls. The room itself was small, white, and lined with self-portraits that could have a place in a modern art museum. To the right was Self Portrait—Submerged, 2013 by the video artist Bill Viola, who was underwater, wearing a blue button-front shirt, his skin seemingly moving as the water rocked across his body. On the opposite wall, along with works by Vanessa Beecroft and Yayoi Kusama, was the artist Jenny Holzer’s 1981 “self-portrait” in words. Block letters on a square white background said:

  SOME DAYS YOU WAKE AND

  IMMEDIATELY START TO WORRY.

  NOTHING IN PARTICULAR IS WRONG,

  IT’S JUST THE SUSPICION THAT

  FORCES ARE ALIGNING QUIETLY

  AND THERE WILL BE TROUBLE.

  No sooner had we filed into the room than the guard began ushering us out, past an installation of a man climbing a ladder to the ceiling. I hadn’t had a chance to look at the other works before we were herded back toward the steps and down another flight of stairs somewhere within the walls of the Pitti Palace, through arched wooden doors that looked as if they had been designed for a Smurf’s house, and then—poof!—into the Boboli Gardens, beside a high palace wall covered with vines and lemons. The sky was impossibly blue, like the Buddha in the window of rue de la Parcheminerie.

  To my left was the otherworldly Buontalenti Grotto, pink and green, dripping with stalactites and stalagmites. The guide in my ear explained: “Those are rocks made of sponges.” He then began describing the sculptures inside the grotto, including Giambologna’s Venus Emerging from the Bath. Yet despite the grotto’s strange beauty, I couldn’t keep my eyes on the fountain, as something was happening in the sky.

  I pulled the listening device from my ear. I had no idea what I was looking at. Colorful blobs were not merely floating but hovering above us, changing shape like liquid in a lava lamp. Perhaps I’d been in the Vasari corridor too long. Maybe it was Stendhal Syndrome. Someone said “balloons,” and because no other explanation made sense, I decided that they were, in fact, balloons. I stood in the October sun, craning my neck, watching them disappear into the stratosphere, wondering what celebration they had left early.

  When they rose too high to see, I returned the listening device to the professor and thanked him. If the tour was ultimately not as revelatory as I had hoped, I had had weeks of excitedly anticipating that it would be—and that, as Elizabeth Dunn would say, was joy already in the bank.

  I set off to meet John for lunch, leaving the group behind as I followed a wide, curving path between lampposts, past palm trees, toward the Egyptian obelisk and the lemon house, where the citrus trees winter. Near an allée of cypresses, I stopped at a water fountain with a hidden delight in its copper bowl: two tiny sculptures of what appeared to be skulls, facing each other like chicks in a nest, water splashing and babbling between them.

  I walked on toward the sound of running water, to the grotto of Adam and Eve. The couple looked beat: faces fallen, alabaster bodies splashed with grime. Their grotto was decorated with mosaics of scallops and pebbles shaped like anchors, ropes, and a trident. On its back walls moss sprouted from the g
aping mouth of a wild-haired gargoyle.

  In a small pool at Adam and Eve’s feet, orange koi swam back and forth, reminding me of the fish in the black water of the Basilica Cistern in Istanbul. I stood watching them, listening contentedly to the sound of falling water, until once again I heard footsteps approaching. I turned to go, my canvas sneakers crunching the gravel path toward the gate and the hill that leads back to the center of town.

  * * *

  In the fall, at night, a cold wind flies through the streets. The Arno is black, and you’re suddenly aware of just how low the walls are along the bridges. The wind goes through your jacket, into your bones, as you’re walking back to your hotel after seeing Verdi’s La Traviata at Saint Mark’s English Church, or after a Bloody Mary at the bar in the St. Regis. You hear your footsteps echo on the cobblestones. So can anyone else in the dark.

  You walk, unsure of whether your uneasiness is an intuition of actual danger, or if your mind is merely spooling some noir fantasy. Being on your own can easily become chiaroscuro, an interplay of light and darkness. One night you’re walking alone, imagining being plunked on the head and dumped into the Arno along with fifteenth-century Dominican friars and Rauschenberg’s early works. Another night, you walk carefree through shadows.

  On my last evening in the city, I went walking with no particular destination in mind. People seemed restless, pinballing around the crooked, ill-lit streets in coats and scarves, looking for something to do. Here and there, under pools of eerie, unflattering light, tourists were trying to buy leather gloves before the shops closed. Students were carousing. Tipsy lovers were embracing on the Ponte Vecchio, gazing at the graceful strings of bridges under an almost full moon.

  Near my hotel, on the sidewalk in front of La Rinascente, the department store that takes its name from the Italian word for “rebirth,” a woman was being arrested for shoplifting. There can come a point during a solo trip, no matter how fabulous it may be, that the air is let out. The night feels long. The cobblestone piazza, where you began the day at a sunny sidewalk table with eggs and truffles, loses its charm. The pretty boutiques don’t manage to lift your spirits, even as you’re buying something for someone you love back home.