Last frames from the Uffizi. x
It’s interesting to think about the outsized role that Florence has played in shaping Italy’s language and national identity. It keeps coming up in the books I’m reading. The “questione della lingua,” which took on new urgency after unification, unfolded along two lines of tension. One looked backward, seeking authority in the literary language of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, treating the Florentine of the Trecento as the standard to be preserved through careful study of the classics. The other looked forward, asking whether a modern nation should instead build its common language from the living speech of ordinary Florentines. Both agreed that Florence was the reference point. Alessandro Manzoni famously argued that Italian should be “rinsed in the Arno,” the river running through the heart of Florence.
In some ways, I can still see this tension mirrored in something broader in contemporary Italian culture: the persistent dialogue between rigidity and spontaneity, purity and contamination; between framing established forms behind glass and placing everyday creativity on a pedestal. We bought a cookbook here that seems to capture this perfectly. On the same page, you’ll find references to handfuls and sprinkles and cooking times that are simply assumed or left to the reader’s discretion—or, perhaps, to a fond memory of nonna—alongside very specific instructions about the type of knife to use or the kind of mushroom to source.
Maybe that’s what I find so compelling about Italy: it never seems interested in resolving its contradictions. x
Right across from the Palazzo Strozzi, where we saw the Rothko in Firenze exhibit, is the Palazzo dello Strozzino, which houses the beautiful Giunti Odeon, a bookstore, café, and free cinema. They were screening Titanic when we visited.
The building has been a theatre since 1914 and became a cinema in 1922, before being renovated and reopening in its current incarnation through a partnership with the Giunti Editore publishing house in 2023. x