At the very end of our recent trip we ended up in Florence, Italy for a few days. We had been in the Chianti region just a bit south, and we were scheduled to begin our return flight at the Florence airport, so we figured that we should investigate this famous city a bit. (By the way, about that Florence airport… perhaps a story for another time.) This was our first visit to Florence, and it is a remarkable city in many ways — its very long history, its maze of narrow, curving streets, the architecture and museums, and more. I would like to go back.
It is also a pretty popular tourist destination, which seems to be the trend with so many such places. It seemed like most of the tourists were perhaps Italian, but the city was also crowded with people from all over the world. The press of visitors, of course, cannot help but have an effect on the city, and there is (as in so many popular cities) an uneasy balance between the qualities of the city that draw people there and those very people who come to visit. It seemed to me at times that perhaps 90% of the people I saw were either visitors or locals there to take care of the visitors. But every so often I would catch a glimpse of someone who did not fit into that pattern — a woman in a scarf ducking down and alley, someone going to work, perhaps the fellow with the bicycle, and this woman walking down one of the town’s narrow streets.
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G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him. Blog | Bluesky | Mastodon | Substack Notes | Flickr | Email
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