Two Florentine characters

Puccini pared down

Puccini is a full-blooded composer of unforgettable passions, big tunes and broken hearts. And even in a pared-down performance of just four singers and one piano, in a large and frankly pretty empty church, the story of the doomed love of Mimi and Rodolfo in La bohème came across powerfully. The cast only offered snapshots of the opera, but they strung the arias and extracts together in a way that captured the essence of the story. I wasn't won over by the voice of the soprano singing Mimi, Valentina Bor. For all her dynamic volume and musical understanding, her tone seemed somehow thin, at moments shrill. Angelo Fiore, singing the part of Rodolfo, however, had a gorgeous tenor voice so warm it could melt stone. Shame there weren't more people at S Stefano al Ponte that Sunday evening to hear him: his voice was one of those unexpected finds that makes it worth going to a concert you know nothing about in advance.

The River Arno

First words in Italian

Hmm. Well, after 20 hours of lessons, I can say a few more words than this time last week. Rita, a feisty, funny Italian woman who is our teacher, has been plying us with plenty of grammar and vocabulary, no mean feat given the high spirits, varied languages and low boredom threshold of the ten students in our beginners’ class. I can’t get much further than telling you my name, where I’m from and what I do, then perhaps going wild and asking you the time, but it’s a start.

And what a beautiful language Italian is. I had worried about being confused between French and Italian, but in fact the two sound so different that there's not so much to muddle up. It's like learning music by two composers: Debussy, Ravel and Berlioz versus Dallapiccola, Respighi and Bellini. French is full of subtle sounds and colours, with hidden letters that are written but not pronounced, and with others that appear when words run together. Italian seems to me to be bold and open, you articulate everything you see, the sounds are definite. Where French is a poetic, murmuring language, Italian is full of music and lyricism. It's wonderful to have the chance to learn them both.

One doesn't come to Italy for niceness...

‘One doesn't come to Italy for niceness … one comes for life.’ Eleanor Lavish in EM Forster’s A Room with a View

A lot of my ideas about this Italian city before I arrived here were, I must admit, drawn from EM Forster’s A Room with a View. Funny, then, to find how little some things seem to have changed from the Edwardian era of Forster's novel, social attitudes aside. Tourists still flood Florence, travelling to Italy is still a rite of passage for countless young men and women in search of art, food, wine and true love. And if Italy was a favourite destination for the English in the past couple of centuries, it has become a mecca for travellers around the world now. Lonely Planet guides replace the ubiquitous Baedeker, the guide Miss Lavish so unhelpfully takes from Lucy Honeychurch, leaving her stranded in Santa Croce; instead of young travellers being chaperoned abroad by older friends or family, they head to coach tours, youth hostels and language courses; everyone still has their opinion about what you should see first, overwhelming the new visitor with ‘perfect torrents of information’; and there is on certain street corners ‘a smell! A true Florentine smell!’

One week in Firenze

It’s the end of my first week in Florence. It’s pouring with rain – it’s torrential, in fact, and thunder is pealing over the city, replacing the church bells of earlier this morning. A Sunday picnic has been postponed by the weather, so instead I’m sitting in my room writing, a cup of tea at my side. It’s actually rather nice to have some enforced peace at the end of the week, and to jot down some impressions of the city. To follow...

Souvenir de Florence

A little Souvenir de Florence, spotted in a shop in the Italian city yesterday. Probably not what inspired Tchaikovsky, I'd guess?

On the train

Two trains, and over 24 hours of travel behind me, and I have made it to Florence. It's Sunday morning, the skies are grey and the streets are silent. It is just after 7am. Too early for anyone sensible to be up. Sitting on the doorstep of a flat waiting for an hour and a half to be let in is not my ideal start to the day, but a chic Italian woman who speaks English with a Helena-Bonham-Carter accent arrives at the set time to let me in. I drag my lead-weight suitcase up the stone stairs inside, winding round and up until we reach a double wooden door and my home for the next month. There are two rooms to choose from: a rectangular garret-like room up the twistiest, tiny staircase you’ve ever seen. With only a skylight and no window, there was no contest. I had to have the downstairs room. Noisier, and overlooking the street, it was, at least, A Room with a View. 

The adventure started at St Pancras. There's a sense of being on the doorstep of the continent, only slightly dampened by the hordes of French schoolchildren packing out the terminal and taking over the train. But glorious sunshine awaited in Paris and the first hour and a half of my afternoon wait for the overnight Thello train to Italy soon passed by, as I sat outdoors, perched on a step outside the Gare de Lyon with a newspaper and tens of other travellers (Gare de Lyon, pictured above).

The Thello train is an experience. No frills or fanciness here, and also no concession to those with vertigo. I was sharing a three-bunk compartment, with two women in the their 50s, neither of whom had packed lightly. Nor had I. For the first two and a half hours we sat perched on the seats in a comical line, hemmed in by oversize suitcases. I read. On my left, woman one, dressed in jeans and a neat blouse, with short brown hair and glasses, listened to jazz on her iPod and ate her Tupperware-packed dinner. She spoke French and Italian. On my right, woman two, filled in crosswords in a brightly-coloured word puzzle magazine, ate a sandwich and then offered round a bag of licorice all-sorts.

At 9.30pm, the train attendant comes round to make the beds. Luckily, I had the bottom bunk – the top bunk is vertiginously high up, held by two rather flimsy looking straps and only accessible by a ladder. Throughout the night, the train hurtles along. The constant changes of pace and passing round corners leaves you feeling upside down one second, and sliding into oblivion the next. It doesn't make for a wholly peaceful sleep, but there's still something rather joyous about waking up in a different country, waking up in Florence.