Cappuccino a Giubbe Rosse. Piazza Repubblica. Firenze. Photograph. Nokia phone. 2007

When I was six years old I had a journal for notes (‘dediche’) my classmates would write me at the end of the year. It was a sort of summary of the things they liked (or did not) about me. We don’t have yearbooks in Italy (or proms, or school mascots- or cheerleaders). We just study. The seriousness of the Italian school system is reflected in these sober writings, coming from first graders.
Children’s greatest gift is honesty, and my dediche range from innocuous/benign to decidedly prophetic (your rambling result in interesting information sometimes), to right down ambivalent (I like you when you are nice to me. I don’t like you when you don’t share your comic books).
They are a treasure to hold.

Well, on the cover of this little journal there is a quote, a simple quote, I have always loved:

There is a rose in memory’s garden
That grows because of you,
And whenever my heart wanders there
Then that rose blooms anew.

The rose that blooms constantly for me is the memory of my magical year in Firenze.
There is a caffe’ flanking the expanse of Piazza Repubblica– a large square situated on the site of the ancient Roman forum: Giubbe Rosse.
Giubbe Rosse has been called a ‘a forge of dreams and passions’, and is an historical literary cafe’ opened in the 1900’s, with important ties to artistic movements such as the Italian Futurism. The waiters wear red shirts in memory of Garibaldi’s Red Shirt army , a symbol of liberal Italians (this was before red was associated with communism).

Giubbe Rosse was where my classmates and I would congregate, late at night, to take a break from architecture, sip the delicious cappuccino (the best in Florence) and sit outdoors, contemplating the starry florentine sky, the palazzi surrounding the square, the poignancy of time inexhorably ticking by.

I miss squares. I miss the feeling of being enclosed by the city. American cities are made of streets, avenues and boulevards. Not squares. Energy flowing, never resting. Restless? I have longed for the contemplative feeling of a piazza, the restful period at the end of streets like sentences. Perhaps the lack of squares means that american streets are sentences with no periods. Stream of consciousness cities.