The Slow Train to Florence

The light over our head was flickering on and off and the door separating the cars was swinging freely slamming with startling regularity. Stuffing was coming out of the stained seat next to me and graffiti covered the walls. Worst was the locked up and out of order WC that periodically titillated the atmosphere.

How long you say it take you to get to Firenze asked Sal’s cousin, Johnny.

Let’s see, it leaves at 11 and arrives at 330, that’s 4-1/2 hours.

A wry smile spread out across Johnny’s face. Oh that’s, uh…how you say… the scenic train. The fast train takes only an hour and a half. You take the slow train to Firenze.

I had done a lot to organize this trip and the thought that I had made such a fundamental mistake annoyed me. I sat stewing as the train stopped once again. Everyone else slept after a night of food and wine at Johnny and Anna Maria’s in their home in Santa Maria delle Mole outside Rome. The tickets were non-refundable, non transferrable and sold by a French travel agent that I bought on line through “EuropeRail”. The Italian capotreno (conductor) had looked skeptically at the ticket and sneered “This is no good”

I opened my Kindle, Amazon’s electronic book, a handy way of taking your library with you on travels but had a hard time concentrating. Hunger made my stomach rumble, harmonizing with the groan of the brakes at yet another station. It was now two hours into the trip and the memory of grilled swordfish, pesto pasta, garden tomatoes, fresh ricotta and cold white wine amid the smell of vineyards and night jasmine still lingered from Johnny and Anna Maria’s.

The train picked up speed and I stood up, put my Kindle down and pushed open the window as we passed through the lush green countryside of Umbria. The hill towns’ ancient towers and walls of stone rose up above the fields of sunflowers and corn. These villages and fortresses belonged there as if outcrops of the mountains that surrounded them. With the wind blowing in my face and curtains flying, a little old lady I had not noticed before stood up behind me and slammed the window closed. She said something in Italian and I sat down hard in my seat.

I shrugged my shoulders in a half hearted apology to the woman and picked up my Kindle again. I was reading “1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus” by Charles Mann. The demise of Indian civilizations in the Americas while touring the cradle of Western Culture was a bit weird but the subject fascinated me and so I dove in.

In 1491 the corn and sunflower I viewed from the train were not here, neither were tomatoes, tobacco, peppers, cocoa, strawberries or peanuts; all from the Americas. In turn the Europeans brought horses, coffee, cane sugar and wheat to the Americas. They also brought smallpox, influenza, typhoid fever, cholera, scarlet fever, yellow fever, malaria, measles, tuberculosis and the bubonic plague. The favor was returned with the introduction of syphilis from America to Europe. At the time the largest populated nation in the world was the Inca in South America but not for long. Within 100 years 90% of the Americans had died of diseases introduced by the Europeans. By comparison The Black Death of the 14th century killed about 40% of the European population.

With my head filled with the Pre- Columbian Americas we pulled into the train station in Florence. All was well when we checked our bags at the station and had a great meal at a restaurant nearby. We even found a cab that could take all of us and luggage to our apartment at Fattoria di Maiano, a 15th century villa in the foothills surrounding Florence. We had arrived at the heart and soul of the Renaissance and I was in some sort of strange cosmic reorganization transported from the Americas into the Old World and the land of Michelangelo, Botticelli, Donatello, and Da Vinci. Curiously 1492 marked the end of the Golden Age of the Renaissance when it’s great patron Lorenzo (The Magnificent) de’ Medici died. Two years later his son Piero the Unfortunate lost it all when King Charles VII of France invaded Italy and took Florence by force. With the fall of the Medici dynasty came the rise of the Franciscan monk Giolamo Savonarola predicting the Last Days. He used the failings of the house of Medici to fuel his rhetoric and cited the sudden and deadly outbreak of syphilis as a sure sign the end was near. He was right the end was near for those that lived on the other side of the world.