Bridge Time

I guess you could say I've been back at work for a week now, but this is just the beginning of my fourth day in the office. So far I'm managing to retain the peaceful energy of my sabbatical. It helps to keep revisiting the images on my iPhone and iPad. They open my memory to the sights and sounds and smells of a place that is still very real to me. I've seen pictures of the Duomo Piazza with its big Christmas tree and narrow streets with Christmas lights and store windows. Oh, how I would love to be at Mercato Centrale right now.

In my imagination I can be there in an instant and tell myself that I'll be going back to Florence again and again. I hope that proves to be true. But when I go back, even if I make a bee line to Osteria Giovanni or to the convent at San Marco or to the little bar where we stood for our morning cappucino, it will be a new day and a new experience. That is as it should be. As Herclitus said, you can't step in the same river twice. Time remains such a mystery to me.

There were three bridges in Florence that I crossed on a fairly regular basis. The one in the picture is Ponte Vecchio. Until the time of the Medicis the shops were butchers and fishmongers and greengrocers. The river, in addition to being a source of fish and a means of delivery, was their waste disposal system. The shopkeepers would toss their scraps and trimmings overboard to hungry creatures below and the currents that carried them away.

But when the Medicis built the Vasari Corridor -- those are the little windows along the top of the bridge -- their 'secret' passageway from the Palazzo Vecchio to the Pitti Palace, they were offended by the smell of the shops and used their muscle to displace the food market in lieu of the silver and goldsmiths who have their shops there to this day. Some of the jewelry was nice, but it was all so glitzy and much of it tacky and ostentatious that it wasn't very tempting.

And of course now there are artists selling 'original' watercolors of the Florence streetscapes, Nigerian boys with their knock-off Guccis and Pradas spread out on blankets so they can swoop them up and run when the caribinieri show up, and throngs of tourists being informed by guides holding furled umbrellas overhead. And everybody on the bridge is either eating gelato or smoking a cigarette. At night musicians play there and their music floats up the river.

The bridges of Florence have been destroyed a number of times by floods, which are not all that infrequent, and by war. The Santa Trinita Bridge was designed by Michelangelo, blown up by the Germans, and rebuilt from the pieces they found in the river.
I'm thinking about bridges today, the beautiful, magical bridges of Florence and the utilitarian highway bridges of Austin that take me to and from work every day. My father's family were literally bridge builders. I have a photograph of my great grandfather and my very young grandfather at the ribbon cutting of the Arlington Bridge in Washington, DC, which they built. But I'm not an engineer, so my call to bridges is more poetic and theological.

I'm aware of being in a bridge time. The very sacred gift of sabbatical is on the other shore of the river now that I am back at home and at church, but I hope I can keep the access open, that I can travel back to the realities I experienced on both banks of the Arno, the little wine bar right at the stoop of the Church of Santa Felicita, the sandwich shop where we ate and balanced our wine in the street as motorcycles and cars wove among the crowd, the steps of the Convent of San Marco, where I conversed for hours with Fra Angelico's Annunciation, the window of our flat, where I'd watch the bells of Santa Croce swing as they rang the Angelus. I don't know how to keep it all alive until I go back, but I'm clinging to the bridges right now to be my help and my access.