FROM AN ITALIAN JOURNAL
occasionally underwritten
in
Italian. The atmosphere is that of a pro–
vincial British hotel in an eternity of Sundays, though
they
"no longer
come to us as they used to. They, too, are passing through difficult days."
Americans, of course, are wonderful-so gay, so young, etc.; but the
manager's daughter, whose English is impeccable B.B.C., complains
with a little pout that her friends laugh at her-"my accent has become
a little coarse"-since the Gl's were here.
To the left the Ponte Vecchio; to the right the provisional iron
structure that has replaced the Santa Trinita. The gallery that led
from the Uffizi Gallery to the Pitti is broken in the middle; on both
sides of the Ponte Vecchio a jagged heap of ruins, lit up under the
solitary street lamp, has that crumpled, uncovered look of scenery the
minute the footlights are turned off. In the daytime the ruins look
peculiarly incongruous, a tabloid headline in an illuminated manu–
script, against the round towers and the slender cypresses, each cluster
of them supreme on its hill. The Germans were on one side of the
river and the Americans on the other; hard to think of Florence being
fought over on this street.
At the noon hour an old man in an old boat, moored in the
middle of the Arno just below our window, patiently dredging up mud
from the bottom, hour by hour, which he as patiently packs up on
every side of
him.
Across the way a little boy swimming off a little
delta that has formed
in
front of his house. A scull shoots by, propelled
by a young man in tights and blazer and wearing that smart little
beard-Dino Grandi, Italo Balbo-why did I think it was worn only
by Fascist aviators and ambassadors? Just below the embankment, on
the other side of the river, the familiar whitewash slogan we saw on
every wall coming down from Genoa:
VOTATE PER IL P. COMU–
NISTA CHE VI DARA' PACE LAVORO LIBERTA'.
June 12-Ran into P., who was born in New York of Italian
parentage and originally came here before the war to finish a medical
course.·
An
ex-GI and, of course, armed with the precious green pass–
port: which will do for us what Roman citizenship once did for St.
Paul. He gets around familiarly in American army circles from Leghorn
to Pisa and has the friendliest relations with the brass. With the tough–
faced pal who is saddled on us everytime we see
him,
he is engaged
in some elaborate financial exchange deal that obviously pays off. (The
lire today 650 to the dollar; some weeks ago it was 900.) They go
around Florence with great wads of lire stuffed into one of those ver–
tical leather zipper bags that are sold at home for packing a bottle
of whiskey into a suitcase. The pal, who might be an extra in a gangster
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