Botticelli Blue Skies: An American in Florence

52. L’Ultimo Addio, Last Views of the Ponte Vecchio

Ice crystals creep across the window hours before dawn on our last night in Florence. Rain has been forecast, but the night is clear and icy. The alarm has just waked us at 2 A.M.; we must be outside with all our luggage, the apartment vacated, by 3 A.M., when the taxi will arrive at the gate to take us to the meeting place on the lungarno where the bus from Rome first dispatched us into our Italian lives. Flung out of sleep into groggy awareness, we stumble about, getting our balance and trying to accept the fact that we have come to the end of our grand adventure. For the past two days, we have been making our good-byes. Professor Materassi and his wife held a tea to bid us farewell, inviting an illustrious Italian publisher (who promised to consider my work for publication in Italy), the son of an American writer who was visiting in Florence, and Riccardo and the young woman, Angela, to whom he is engaged to be married. Angela, a shy, pretty woman, managed to communicate to me that she wished her English were better. I confessed that my Italian was just as lacking, and we both laughed. We clasped hands, liking one another at once. Millie Materassi served us slices of delicious panettone, creamfilled delicacies, fruit tarts on lacey paper circles. Professor Materassi, 281 52 L’Ultimo Addio, Last Views of the Ponte Vecchio 282 Professor Mario Materassi, Millie, Luisa, and Figaro handsome and professorial in his beard, sipped his tea and told us lastminute tales of Florence and its wonders. The Materassis’ soulful-eyed cat, Figaro, perched on the piano bench, the curve of his back a question mark. How can you leave here? was the question. Yesterday, Cornelia and I had our parting luncheon at the Grande Mondo Ristorante Cinese. We hugged good-bye over a table of plum wine, Dragon chips, and primavera rolls. We promised to write to each other. Later in the afternoon, our landlady, Rina, stopped by to settle our phone bill and to offer us a bottle of their lovely wine from the farm. We had to decline, pleading lack of space and too much weight in our bags. She thanked me, amused, for all the packages of pasta and jars of tomato sauce I was leaving behind for her. Finally, we shared our last supper with Riccardo and Angela, who gave us as a parting gift a book—of the same gargantuan size as the Giovanni Colacicchi artworks—containing magnificent aerial views of Tuscany . We toasted all the simple and fine things: our last pizza, our last bottle of Chianti Classico, our last noisy, smoky, passionate pizzeria. Botticelli Blue Skies 283 Our landlady, Rina Now, in this last dawn, our small bedroom is emptied of all objects but our suitcases, which lie open, packed to their brims, waiting for one last and desperate compression to get them closed. We dress in haste, pack up our toothbrushes, toss away the last of the soap and shampoo, focus on removing the dust and debris of our occupancy as well as we can. Last, fast, things must be done: coffee made in the due tazze espresso maker, the last lighting of the stove with the accendigas, a bite or two of packaged sugared buns, and a brief regret for the foods to be left behind for Rina: the bags of potatoes and onions, the full jar of Nutella hazelnut chocolate creme, the frozen gelato, the sealed bottles of succo di pomodoro, the too many packages of pasta I bought in the zeal and hope of making pasta here for eternities to come. All these decisions are wrenching; this is not a sentimental parting, this is surgery! Joe and I are silent in our preparations to leave, each counting his own duties, his own losses. I feel, with the force of blows on my back, what I will no longer have. Time is going faster than we imagined; we are nearly breathless with our little jobs; taking the garbage down, scrubbing the surfaces of the stove, sink, and table, checking the closets and the drawers, stripping the basket-bed of its heavy linens, looking once more from each window, memorizing how the lights on the hills look to the east, west, and south but having no time to climb to the roof terrace to look...