The interior of Brunelleschi’s Santo Spirito church in Florence

What makes a good trip, or a good day, or even, if we are to get downright philosophical, a good life? The test is surely not that the whole trip or day or life is unwaveringly serene and sunny and without glitches. Perhaps a trip or a day could pass like that (never, alas, for me), but a life of that sort would not be human or possible. Sometimes a trip, or a day, I was thinking, can be made good by half an hour of intense pleasure or illumination, a sudden connection made, the right café found, a burst of warm sun on a church step.

I had scheduled two days in Florence either side of a professional wine and food tour of Chianti Classico, and seemed to have set myself up for disappointment. The disappointment was not so much with Florence as with myself. I simply could not recapture the excitement and hunger for culture which had energised me on my first two or three trips to the Tuscan capital. Seeing the marching columns of eager young tourists heading for Brunelleschi’s dome and Giotto’s bell-tower, I veered off the beaten track. But where to go? I decided I could not face the Uffizi, undoubtedly swarming, or the Pitti, just too far away in sweltering July sun; there was the Bargello, and those late, expressionist sculptures by Donatello, endless churches and cloisters, but none of these wonders called to me.

Walking without aim or appetite, I even began to wonder about Florence itself. Wasn’t there actually something rather dark, even menacing, about this ever-emulated city? Didn’t those battlements speak of cruelty, and wasn’t the lightless huddle of the buildings a sign of the barbarism of the times, when brutal warlords reigned? I remembered that George Bernard Shaw, returning to the English Midlands in 1894 for a show of Pre-Raphaelite art after a few weeks studying religious art in Florence, commented that “on the whole Birmingham was more hopeful than the Italian cities, for the art it had to shew me was the work of living men”.

I carried on walking, my steps taking me south, to the embankment of the Arno, and then over the Ponte Santa Trinita. I was not walking entirely without aim, I was being drawn to a corner of Florence that carries more memories for me than any other.

That corner is the Piazza Santo Spirito, with its market and cluster of reasonably-priced trattorie, its eight or so trees providing shade, the stuccoed façade and tower of one of Florence’s more hidden churches – and the Pensione Sorelle Bandini, which was the shabby-chic place to stay when I was a student.

I had lunch – fettucine with pecorini and asparagus, a green salad, a beer – on the outside terrace of the Trattoria Cabiria (named I suppose after the heroic prostitute in my favourite Fellini film Le Notti di Cabiria) while a tremendous wind made the sunshade awning balloon like the mainsail of a yacht.

Many headed for cover indoors but I stayed, buoyed up not just by the buffeting wind but by a rising tide of well-being. More precisely I felt gratitude – gratitude that this place had remained so delightfully and miraculously ordinary. I felt grateful to the kind waitress and tired-eyed waiter who remained so much calmer than the customers. I felt, finally, grateful to be in Florence again, 30 years after my first visit to this spot, possibly a bit more human than I was then.

An open door to the side of the blank church façade beckoned; I walked in and found myself in the Cenacolo Santo Spirito, the old, Gothic refectory of the original church, burned down and rebuilt in Renaissance style to plans by Brunelleschi.

The east wall of the Cenacolo, now a small, eclectic museum, is covered by a sombrely magnificent fresco of the crucifixion, attributed to Andrea Orcagna.

Orcagna was the leading artist of the mid-14th century in Florence, but he is not a household name today, except in the households of medieval art historians.

We think of Florence as primarily an early Renaissance, 15th-century city rather than a Gothic, 14th-century one; a city of light, not darkness. Orcagna survived the great plague of 1348 which killed half the city’s population; no doubt it coloured his imagination.

All the same, in the presence of death, an extraordinarily vital congregation is gathered: people of Florence, in helmets, hats and veils. But the rhythmic vitality of the fresco comes above all from the angels who dance, in an ecstasy of grief which defies grief, around the figure of the crucified Christ.

Aristotle argued in the Nicomachean Ethics that it could only be said at the end of a human life whether that human being had flourished. A dull or unsatisfactory day, or years of disappointment, can be redeemed by a burst of glory at the end.

harry.eyres@ft.com
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