For the past 32 years my wife and I have talked about taking a trip to Italy. Despite the fact that I have been designing environments based on European architecture I had never actually set foot in many of the places that I was depicting. All this changed in September when we spent three weeks in Italy. Rather than taking the “grand tour” we decided to spend our time in only one place. It was our desire to get to know where we were, working our way past the grinding pace of the visiting tourist and settle down to the pace of the Italian locals. We wanted to find our own haunts, and set our own schedule, and the place we chose to do all this was Florence.
I brought my sketchbook and watercolors along. It was my intent to find secluded benches and corners and take the time to soak up the view, chronicling the architecture and light. What I quickly discovered was the shear crush of tourists around me made this nearly impossible. I also began to realize that what I really wanted to depict was my own observations of the place. At the end of each day we would return to our little rented apartment and I would sketch down a few of the things I saw along our long walks through the Florentine streets. I could have easily filled multiple sketchbooks with the things I observed, but three weeks only allowed me to fill 20 pages or so of just some of the highlights. I was basically writing a letter to my pre-Italy self, trying to describe all those things that made this place so unique, especially to the infants eyes of someone who grew up in a country where a washing machine from the 1940’s is considered “old”.
A well travelled friend advised me before our departure that the thing that I would likely have the hardest time grappling with is the pure “is-ness” of the place. He was not wrong. The layers of age, the density of the buildings, and evidence of centuries of people ever adapting their environment to their current needs was overwhelming. Although three weeks is scarcely enough time to really get to know anyplace, we were able to shed some of our tourist gawkiness, and settle into the pace of the Italian lifestyle, in our small way owning Florence for a short time.
One of my first emotions was a little shame. My career is to recreate places like this and setting foot onto the ancient cobblestone streets and touching the masonry of societies that pre-date the Romans is a humbling experience. How dare we even try to create a facsimile when the world has THIS to visit first hand? This transitioned into a new understanding of my job. To judge a themed environment against the original is like criticizing the musical “Guys & Dolls” for not accurately recreating New York City, or blaming Disney’s Pinocchio for not depicting the streets of Italy historically. There is only one Florence, but this doesn’t mean that we can’t learn from what makes these places so timeless and attempt to bring this to our more theatrical reinterpretations. Travel only makes us better designers, as long as we understand that we aren’t recreating, we are allowing these places to influence or work through observations of detail and our experience of the multi-layered “is-ness” of the place.
Leaving was heartbreaking, and I am not certain I will ever completely recover from the culture shock of returning to my life in the US. What we are trying to do is bring home with us the tiniest bit of the relaxed life we led for those three weeks and adapt it to our comparatively hectic existence living in modern America. We will return when time and finances allow. For now, I have these few pages of sketches, and with luck I will get to return to fill the rest of this sketchbook up. Still, even if I do I will only be scratching the veneer of a much deeper and richer way of existing, in this capitol city of the Renaissance.
