by Todd Borg
“If you don’t put on more clothes,” I said, “you’re the one who will need help restraining me. But if you do put on more clothes, then no one will know how color-coordinated your underthings are.”
“You will know.”
“That’s the problem,” I said. “How am I gonna focus on detecting?”
Street pulled on a thin, loose, drapey black sweater and tight black, elastic pants. She slipped her bare feet into pointy black shoes not much more substantial than ballet slippers. Last, she put on a silver necklace from which hung a tiny turquoise pendant.
“Better?” she said.
“Yes and no. Come help me with this map, but stand a little behind me so I can concentrate.”
She came near. She emanated the tiniest aroma of freesias.
I pointed to the maps. “No street names came through on the small map I printed. So I thought I could find the street shapes on the big map and tell where to go. But it’s like a jigsaw puzzle.”
“Those shapes are right here.” Street pointed.
“How did you find that so quick?”
“I have a Ph.D. in Entomology.”
“Learning about bugs teaches you map reading?”
“Yes, actually,” she said. “The patterns of Italian streets are like the tunnels and galleries that bark beetles carve under tree bark. Confusing, senseless, and utterly captivating. Anyway, half the streets on the big map don’t have names, either.”
“More frustration than captivation,” I said.
“You need to get in touch with your inner Italian romantic,” Street said. “Come on. We’ll find the restaurant by exploring.” She hung her passport pouch around her neck, slipped it under her sweater, picked up her little turquoise clutch, and moved to the door.
TWENTY-SEVEN
We walked down the block toward the duomo.
At the corner, I opened up my map and compared it to the church and the adjacent roads. “The church is tall. So if we get lost, we can always come back to it, right? It will be our center, like a homing beacon.”
“And keep us safe,” Street said.
“You’re making fun of me.”
“No, but you do sound a little like a priest,” she said.
“Maybe I’m in the wrong line of work,” I said.
“Maybe. But if you were a priest, you wouldn’t have the opportunity to appreciate how the color of my lingerie coordinates.”
“There’s a deal breaker.”
“Not all priests obey the rules about celibacy,” Street said.
“I’d have to be discreet,” I said, “and only admire you in public from afar. Then we’d arrange to meet in the secret catacombs for…” I paused.
“Closer admiration?” Street said.
“I was thinking of different words, but yeah.”
We walked down a block. I checked the map. Turned and pointed. Walked down another block where I checked the map again.
“You’re advertising your tourist status to the whole world,” Street said.
“I am a tourist.”
We continued the process and worked our way into a labyrinth of Florentine passageways south of the big church. We went down streets that dead-ended, streets that doubled back in a U shape, streets that were only seven feet wide. At every corner we looked for street names. At most, there were none. Occasionally, there was a stone plaque on a building with a street name carved in it, probably from 600 years ago. Twice we followed a street and saw yet another stone plaque on the same street but with a different name.
“I think this one might be it,” I said, pointing to the map. “See the way it turns at a slight angle to the left here, and then it makes a hard right?”
“Right,” Street said, “which means we’ve walked most of a big circle. Good to get exercise. Here’s number sixty-three.”
We were looking for number 39. I checked the map.
We walked down the next block. Most doorways had no number. Street pointed to a navy blue door about halfway down the next block. “There it is.”
There was a small sign above the door that said Trattoria da Tacito.
We went in.
There was a man behind a counter. He spread his arms wide and made a little bow. “Buon giorno,” he said.
““Buon giorno,” Street repeated. “We’re looking for Antonella Porto. Is she here?”
“Sì.” He grinned and pointed back toward the kitchen. “I am Sylvio, and I will be your host with a smile, and I have this nice table here, no? Antonella would love to be your waitress.” He grinned some more, came around the counter and ushered us to the table. He pulled out a chair for Street. “Antonella is the best in Florence. Our food is the best in Florence. And you will smile when you are eating!”
The man walked back toward the kitchen, called out, and returned with a young woman who had short black hair over white skin and a scattering of freckles behind round, wire-rimmed spectacles. She looked more like the Irish than the olive-skinned Italians. “Please meet Antonella,” Sylvio said.
“Hi,” Antonella said, nodding and smiling.
He talked to her in Italian and, with just a little input from Street, it was decided that we would have the house specialty, some kind of pasta and grilled vegetables. Sylvio waited at the table while Antonella wrote down our order.
“Can you recommend a good wine?” I asked Sylvio after Antonella went back to the kitchen.
Sylvio opened a wine menu and pointed at the selections. “Of course, there is the Chianti Classico that our region is famous for. But if you want a wine to really make you smile, you might try the Brunello from just to the south of here.”
Street saw the Brunello on the menu and raised her eyebrows.
Sylvio was standing sideways to Street. He winked at me with the eye that Street couldn’t see. “Is very good for amore,” he said.
“Brunello it is,” I said.
Sylvio grinned as he left.
“Sixty-eight euros,” Street said. “Twice the Chianti Classico. Is amore that important?” Her mouth hinted at a Mona Lisa smile.
“There’s nothing more important.”
Sylvio came back with the Brunello and made a show of having me taste it and then pouring it into two large wine glasses. His performance was over-the-top, but he exuded charm, and I could see that when tourists went home to Iowa, they would remember their meal at Trattoria da Tacito better than they would remember the duomo.
Street and I chatted while we waited. The Brunello was excellent. The wait stretched out to twenty minutes. Sylvio returned two different times to refill my wine glass and add two drops to Street’s.
I leaned to the side to better see the kitchen, wondering if they’d had to go pick the vegetables, and harvest and grind the wheat to make the pasta.
“Italians don’t rush,” Street said. “They take it easy. Slow meals. Two or three hours off in the middle of the workday. It’s like low blood pressure is the national goal.”
“What about the twenty-five percent of tourists who expire waiting for food,” I said.
Street grinned like Sylvio. “That still leaves odds of three out of four that you’ll make it.”
Antonella brought our first course, which was delicious red and green peppers, zucchini, and eggplant.
After we’d eaten, Antonella brought us a second course of pasta in a cheese sauce. She asked in perfect American English if our meals were okay. She gave us a gap-toothed smile as she spoke.
I answered. “The food is great, thank you. We actually came here on the recommendation of someone you know.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“I understand that you were once an exchange student at UC Berkeley. I spoke to one of your professors, Olga Decker, when I was doing a little research on the Medici family. Ms. Decker told me about you and said that we should look you up if we came to Florence.”
“Oh, how nice to meet you.”
Street and I introduced ourselves.
“How is Professor Decker?” As Antonella said it, her tone was so harsh she might have asked after Street’s maggots.
“Very well,” I said. “She also told me that you know a Medici scholar named Giovanni Drago.”
“Oh, just barely. In my second year at the University of Florence, I took two classes from Professor Drago. My focus was viticulture, but the university thinks that even grape growers should know the history of Florence. Any class on the history of Florence is naturally focused on art history. And a big part of Florentine art history is the history of the Medici family. As we learn here, the Medicis rocked Florence.”
“Can you tell me how to locate Professor Drago?”
“I suppose you could ask at the university. It’s not far from here. The duomo is that way.” She pointed toward the side wall of the trattoria. “And the university is just three blocks north of the duomo. It’s at the Piazza San Marco.”
“Do you know where the faculty offices are? Or is there another office where we should ask about him?”
“There is a reception desk. They will help you. Professor Drago is a full-time professore, so he…” she stopped, thinking. “Wait. Once per session, he brings his class to his house where he has several notable sculptures and paintings and quite the art library. He owns a small Giotto fresco that came from a church that collapsed. And he showed us his copy of da Vinci’s Codex Leicester. That’s the one that the Microsoft guy, Bill Gates, owns. It’s the most expensive book in the world. It’s not like the professor’s copy is so special. After all, you can see all seventy-two pages online. But the professore wants his students to see what an art-focused life is like. So he brings all his students to his house to hang out among his art treasures for an afternoon. Anyway, I probably still have the address in my phone. Can you wait?”
“Of course.”
Antonella went back toward the kitchen. She returned with her phone, scrolling and tapping on the screen. “Here it is.” She angled the phone toward me. “Do you want me to text you?”
“Let me give you my number,” Street said. “Owen is still learning how to work his phone.” Street stated her number.
Antonella typed it in and tapped the phone. “There. I don’t know how fast a text gets to an American number when the phone is over here in Italy, but…”
Street’s phone chimed. She picked it up and looked at the screen. “Got it,” she said.
“Between that address and the university, you should be able to find him.”
“Thanks so much,” I said.
When we were done eating, I left Antonella a good tip and thanked Sylvio for a great meal.
“Grazie mille,” he said, smiling, spreading his arms wide, then taking a bow.
As we walked away, I said, “Charming guy.”
Street said, “That’s the essence of the Italian personality.”
“Where do you think we should try finding Drago? The university?”
Street looked at the time. “It’s already the middle of the afternoon. I’m guessing that most professors would be heading home soon if they haven’t already.”
“His home first, then.”
Two blocks down, we saw a cab and waved, but it didn’t stop. Another block, another cab, which also ignored my wave.
“I think I remember reading that you don’t flag down taxis in Italy,” Street said. “You have to go to a taxi stand.”
“How do we find that?”
“I have no idea,” she said.
“Didn’t you once get a ride with that Uber app on your phone? Could we use that?”
“I did it back in San Francisco where Uber started,” Street said. “But I don’t know about Italy. There was some big transit strike in Europe because the taxi drivers don’t like Uber. I heard it practically shut down France.”
“Wait, you’re saying that because some tech guy in San Francisco came up with a ride app, the result was that transit was crippled in a country on the other side of the ocean?”
“Yeah.”
“Write an app, change the world, get rich,” I said. “I wonder if I could’ve been a techy.”
“Were you the smartest kid in your college?” Street asked.
“I had to get extra credits just to graduate from preschool.”
“There’s your answer.”
So we walked about a mile before we found a taxi stand. There were four other groups in line. After ten minutes, we were in a cab. Street showed the driver her phone with Professore Drago’s address.
“Please take us there,” Street said.
The man nodded, spoke back, sped off.
Taxis in Florence are a dance with danger. We jerked around corners, dashed in front of fast-moving buses, screeched the brakes on many occasions, some of which even involved stopping. We went over a bridge that crossed the Arno River. In the distance down the river was the Ponte Vecchio Bridge, covered with multiple stories of shops suspended above the water. As the turns multiplied and the streets flashed by, it felt like we were in a maze.
Eventually, the driver pulled over and pointed at the doors across the street. None of them had numbers that I could see.
I pointed out the window. “Where?”
The man turned toward the back seat and pointed at Street’s phone, which she was still holding.
“Dove è il numero di casa?” Street said.
The man pointed again at several doorways across the street and spoke many Italian words.
“La porta blu?” Street said.
“Rossa, rossa.”
“The red door,” I said, slowly catching on.
“Sì.”
“Grazie,” Street said as she opened the car door.
When we were out of the cab, Street pointed to a huge building a block or two over. “That’s the Pitti Palace,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“Today, it’s basically a giant museum. Back in the Renaissance, it was one of the Medici residences.”
“That giant place was one of their houses,” I said.
“Right.”
“Yikes,” I said.
Street turned around to the place we’d come to see and the rossa doorway the cab driver had pointed at.
The building was like many others in Florence. It was made of stone and was unembellished except for a shiny magenta-glazed, wall-mounted pot that held red geraniums the same color as the red door. We walked over to the door.
As I was about to knock, the door opened and a man walked out. He was tall and thin and dressed neatly but in drab colors. I guessed him at about seventy.
“Professor Drago?” I said.
He stopped on the sidewalk and looked at me. The expression on his face was the one that movie stars save for paparazzi.
“We’d like to ask you a question about the Medicis,” I said, thinking that there was a decent chance a professor would speak English. “Could you please spare a minute?”
“No. I’m busy,” he said in perfect BBC English. He shook his head and walked away.
“Could we talk to you later this evening?”
He spoke over his shoulder as he walked away from us. “If you want to know about the Medicis, go to the library.”
“Please, I’m only asking for a minute.”
Without turning back toward us, he lifted a hand and made an abrupt wave as if to flick off a troublesome insect.
“Well, that didn’t go too smoothly,” Street said.
“Let’s wait a bit, then follow him,” I said in a quiet voice.
Street looked at me. “What’s the point? What if he’s going on a long walk?”
When he got down toward the end of the block, I started walking after him, but I lagged, allowing the distance between us to increase.
“There was something furtive in the way he looked around when he came out of the doorway,” I said.
Street turned away from me and looked at the man as we walked. She frowned. “Furtive,” she said. “I didn’t sense that. Is that a
detective thing? Can you read people at a more nuanced level than ordinary mortals?”
“Maybe if I’m sensing fear or anxiety or bad intentions.”
“Like predator or prey,” Street said. “The emotions connected to the criminal world.”
“Yeah.”
“So you want to follow him? Because of a single look?”
“That, and I’m put off that he wouldn’t talk to us.”
“It’s about a bruised ego.”
“A little. I’ve learned to go on instinct. When I want information from someone, and that someone acts in a certain way, I’ve learned to watch and see what I can learn.”
“Because you might get some leverage,” Street said.
“Maybe.”
Up ahead, the man went around a corner, out of our sight. I picked up our pace. We came around the corner. The professore was down the block.
“Which of those predator/prey emotions did that man have?”
“I’m not sure. Anxiety mixed with anticipation.”
“That’s quite the subtle observation.”
I shrugged.
Drago went down several more blocks, heading toward the center of Florence. At one intersection, we could see the duomo in the far distance. The man turned another corner and went into a small shop. There were some angled bins in front of the shop that were filled with oranges and apples and melons. We stopped a half block away on the other side of the street. We stood so that a van was between us and the shop. We could still see the shop entry, but we were largely obscured by the van.
A couple came out of the shop. They each carried a bag. A baguette protruded from one. A camera hung around the neck of the man, and the woman held up her phone to take a picture of the fruit display in front of the shop. Tourists. A man went into the shop, followed by another tourist couple. A young woman walked up. She looked unusual in that, despite the warm sunny day, she wore what looked like a light frock over her clothes, and she carried a pair of spike heels, her fingers hooked through the little straps. She glanced up at the windows in the stone wall above the shop, then went inside. The second tourist couple came out. They carried a bag of chips, and the man carried two large bottles of beer. Another man came out of the shop, carrying nothing.
