Yesterday being St. John’s Day, the 24th June, and St. John being the patron saint of Florence, his day being also the day of midsummer festival, when, in the north, you jump through the flames: for all these reasons Florence was lit up, and there was a show of fireworks from the Piazzale. There must be fire of some sort on Midsummer Day: so let it be fireworks.
The illuminations were rather scanty. The Palazzo Vecchio had frames of little electric bulbs round the windows. But above that, all along the battlements of the square roof, and in the arches of the thin-necked tower, and between the battlements at the top of the tower, the flames were orange-ruddy, and they danced about in one midsummer witch-night dance, a hundred or two little ruddy dancements among the black, hard battlements, and round the lofty, unrelenting square crown of the old building. It was at once medieval and fascinating, in the soft, hot, moonlit night. The Palazzo Vecchio has come down to our day, but it hasn’t yet quite come down to us. It lifts its long slim neck like a hawk rearing up to look around, and in the darkness its battlements in silhouette look like black feathers. Like an alert fierce bird from the Middle Ages it lifts its head over the level town, eagle with serrated plumes. And one feels it is a wonder that the modern spirit hasn’t given it a knock over the head, it is so silently fierce and haughty and severe with splendour.
On Midsummer Night the modern spirit had only fixed itself, like so many obstinate insects, in the squares of paltry electric bulb lights on the hard facade. Stupid, staring, unwinking, unalive, unchanging beads of electric lights! As if there could be anything festive or midsummerish about them, in their idiotic fixity like bright colourless brass nail-heads nailed on the night.
Thus far had the modern spirit nailed itself on the old Palazzo. But above, where the battlements ruffled like pinion-tips upon the blond sky, and the dark-necked tower suddenly shot up, the modern spirit unexplainedly ceased, and the Middle Ages flourished. There the illuminations must have been oil flare-lamps, old oil torch lamps, because the flames were like living bodies, so warm and alive, and they danced about perpetually in the warm bland air of night, like Shiva dancing her myriad-movement dance. And all this alive dancement the severe old building carried calmly, with pride and dignity, its neck in the sky. As for the rows of electric bulbs below, like buttons on the breast of a page-boy, they didn’t exist.
If anything is detestable, it is hard, stupid fixity, that doesn’t know how to flicker and waver and be alive, but must keep on going on being the same, like the buttons on a coat; the coat wears out, but the idiotic buttons are the same as ever.
The people were streaming out of the piazza, all in one direction, and all quiet, and all seeming small and alive under the tall buildings. Of course the Palazzo Vecchio and the Uffizi aren’t really tall: in terms of the Woolworth Tower, that is, or the Flatiron Building. But underneath their walls people move diminished, in small, alert, lively throngs, just as in the street-scenes of the old pictures: throngs and groups of striding and standing and streaming people who are quick and alive, and still have a certain alert human dignity, in spite of their being so diminished. And that again is different from the effect of looking down from the top of the Flat- iron Building, let us say. There you see people little and scurrying and insect-like, rather repulsive, like the thick mechanical hurrying of ants.
Out of the Piazza Signoria the people were all flowing in one direction, towards the dark mouth of the Uffizi, towards the river. The fountain was shooting up a long, leaning stem of water, and the rather stupid thick Bandinelli statue below glistened all over, in his thick nakedness, but not unpleasant, really. Michelangelo’s David, in the dry dimness, continued to smirk and trail his foot self-consciously, the incarnation of the modern self-conscious young man, and very objectionable.
But the crowd streamed on, towards the Lungarno, under the big- headed David, unheeding. It is a curious thing, that in spite of that extremely obtrusive male statue of David which stands and has stood for so long a time there in the Piazza, where every Friday the farmers from the country throng to discuss prices, still the name David is practically unknown among the ordinary people. They have never heard it. It is meaningless sound to them. It might as well be Popocatepetl. Tell them your name is David, and they remain utterly impervious and blank. You cannot bring them to utter it.
On the Lungarno the crowd is solid. There is no traffic. The whole length of the riverside has become one long theatre pit, where the whole populace of Florence waits to see the fireworks. In countless numbers they stand and wait, the whole city, yet quiet almost as mice.
The fireworks will go off from the Piazzale Michelangelo, which is like a platform, a little platform away above the left bank of the river. So the crowd solidly lines the right bank, the whole city.
In the sky a little to the south, the fair, warm moon, almost full, lingers in a fleece of iridescent cloud, as if also wanting to look on, but from an immeasurable distance. There is no drawing near, on the moon’s part.
The crowd is quiet, and perfectly well-behaved. No excitement, and absolutely no exuberance. In a sense, there is no holiday spirit at all. A man hawks half-a-dozen balloons, but nobody buys them. There is a little flare-lit stall, where they cook those little aniseed waffles. And nobody seems to buy them. Only the men who silently walk through the throng with little tubs of ice-cream do a trade. But almost without a sound.
It seems long to wait. Down on the grass by the still full river, under the embankment, are throngs of people. Even those boats in which during the day one sees men getting gravel are full of spectators. But you wouldn’t know, unless you looked over the rampart. They are so still. In the river’s underworld.
It is weary to wait. The young men, all wearing no hats, stroll, winding among the throng of immovable citizens and wives. There is nothing to see. Best sit in the motor-car by the kerb.
By the car stand two women with a police-dog on a chain. The dog, alert, nervous, uneasy, crouches and then rises restlessly. Bang! Up goes the first rocket, like a golden tadpole wiggling up in the sky, then a burst of red and green sparks. The dog winces, and crouches under the running-board of the car. Bang! Bang! Crackle! More rockets, more showers of stars and fizzes of aster-petal light in the sky. The dog whimpers, the mistresses divide their attention between the heavens and him. In the sky, the moon draws further and further off, while still watching palely. At an immense distance, the moon, pallid far. Nearer, in the high sky, a rolling and fuming of smoke, a whistling of rockets, a spangling and splashing of fragments of coloured lights, and, most impressive of all, the continuous explosions, crepitation within the air itself, the high air bursting outwards from within itself, in continual shocks. It is more like an air-raid than anything. And perhaps the deepest impression made on the psyche is that of a raid in the air.
The dog suffers and suffers more. He tries to hide away, not to look at all. But there is an extra bang and a fusillade! He has to look! bish! the sky-asters burst one beyond the other! He cannot bear it. He shivers like a glass cup that is going to shatter. His mistresses try to comfort him. They want to look at the fireworks but their interest in the dog is more real. And he, he wants to cover his ears, and bury his head, but at every new bang! he starts afresh and rises, and turns round. Sometimes he sits like a statue of pure distress, still as bronze. Then he curls away upon himself again, curling to get away. While the high sky bursts and reverberates, wiggles with tadpoles of golden fire, and plunges with splashes of light, spangles of colour, as if someone had thrown a stone into the ether from above, and then pelted the ether with stones.
The crowd watches in silence. Young men wander by, and in the subdued tone of mocking irony common to the Italians, they say bello! bello! bellezza! But it is pure irony. As the light goes up, you see the dark trees and cypresses standing tall and black, like Dan- tesque spectators, on the sky-line. And down below, you see the townspeople standing motionless, with uplifted faces. Also, rather frequently, a young man with his arm round his white-dressed sweetheart, caressing her and making public love to her. Love-making, it seems, like everything else, must be public nowadays. The stag goes into the depths of the forest. But the young city buck likes the light to flare up and reveal his arm round the shoulders of his girl, his hand stroking her neck.
Up on the Piazzale, they are letting off the figure-pieces: wheels that turn round showerily in red and green and white fire, fuming dense smoke, that moves in curious slow volumes, all penetrated with colour. Now there is a red piece: and on top of the old water- tower a column of red fire and reddish smoke. It looks as if a city in the distance were being burnt by the enemy. And again the fusillade of a raid, while the smoke rolls ponderously, the colour dies out, only the iridescence of the far, unreachable naked moon tinges the low fume.
In heaven are more rockets. There are lovely ones that lean down in the sky like great spider lilies, with long outcurving petals of soft light, and at the end of each petal, a sudden drop of pure green, ready to fall like dew. But some strange hand of evanescence brushes it away, and it is gone, and the next rocket bursting shows all the smoke-threads still stretching, like the spectre of the great fire lily, up in the sky: like the greyness of wild clematis fronds in autumn, crumbling together, as the succeeding rocket bursts in brilliance.
Meanwhile, in another world, and a world more real, the explosion and percussions and fusillades keep up, and penetrate into the soul with a sense of fear. The dog, reduced and shattered, tries to get used to it, but can’t succeed.
There is a great spangling and sparkling and trailing of long lights in the sky and long sprays of whitish, successively-bursting fire-blossoms, and other big many-petalled flowers curving their petals downwards like a grasping hand. Ah, at last, it is all happening at once!
And as the eye is thrilled and dazzled, the ear almost ceases to hear. Yet the moment the sky empties, it is the percussion of explosions on the heart that one feels.
It is quickly all over. The chauffeur is gabbling sotto voce that it is shorter than last year. The crowd is dispersing so quickly and silently, as if they were running away. And you feel they are all mocking quietly at the spectacle. Panem et circenses is all very well, but when the great crowd quietly jeers at your circus, it leaves you at a loss.
The cathedral dome, the top of Giotti’s tower, like a lily-stem, and the straight lines of the top of the Baptistery are outlined with rather sparse electric bulbs. It looks very unfinished. Yet, with that light above illuminating the pale and coloured marbles ghostly, and the red tiles of the dome in the night-sky, and the abrupt end of the lily-stem without a flower, and the old hard lines of the Baptistery’s top, there is a lovely ethereal quality to the great cathedral group; and you think again of the Lily of Florence — ”The Lily of Florence shall become the cauliflower of Rovenzano,” somebody said.
But not yet, anyhow.