Good Plans Going Wrong to Make Better Plans

I wanted to go to a little walled city called Lucca, about 90 minutes from Florence, but I left my hostel late so I missed the first train, it rained, and then the next train (three hours later) sat in the station for an hour. So I got off, deciding to just stay in Florence, but terribly disappointed.

But, as I am re-learning, things always work out.

I decided to flan through the city, along the river and then through the main part of town. Florence was beautiful, with tall arched stone passageways, old buildings, and little pockets of incredible shops.

I carefully put my backpack down when I stepped into a tiny shop stuffed with handmade ceramics. A friend of mine owned a soup toureen that she bought in Tuscany at a little shop exactly like that one, and it was grounding to realize where I was, in this same sort of place. I had listened to her travel stories in awe, and I realized that I am joining her, in a way.

I was walking through the square by the Duomo (largest cathedral of Florence), where painters are lined up, with their watercolors of the Tuscan countryside and the rooftops of Firenze. One woman caught my attention: first of all, men are usually the painters, and second, her paintings were beautiful, and I realized that I wanted her to know.

So I said hello, and told her that. Her name is Maria. She barely spoke English, and with my few sentences of Italian, we spoke about light, color, what I paint, where she learned, what she loves to paint, which were her favorites, and what they meant to her. I asked her what the Italian word was for sunflower, and she wrote "girasole" in my travel notebook, and then sketched one. She did it quickly, but I was delighted, because it showed how she saw the flower. Anyone would have drawn the petals, the dots for seeds, but she drew different layers of circles in a way I had never seen before. Florence is full of tourists, so she had the classic scenes: fields of sunflowers, red roofs, the Duomo...but at the end of her portfolio were nudes, and still lifes. There was one painting on display that centered on a light post, with purple flowers pouring down from the left and the Duomo in the distance. She told me that this one holds a lot of emotion for her, that Florence means flowers, that it matches, that it was her own work and not a copy of someone else's ideas.

I bought it. And as she handed me the paper bag, she dropped in another small painting, saying that it was a gift, saying she would never forget me. "Ciao, bella".

Cradling my paintings, sitting on the steps of a church in a little square in Florence, I finally fell in love with Italy.