Going with the Flow
Let’s face it; when it comes to travel very few of us are without sin. Of course, some folk are more culpable than others, measuring out their lives with planes taken as if they’re taxis and air miles accumulated with no thought of the damage they’re doing to the planet.
Meanwhile, places on which tourists descend like locusts have become unliveable for locals. One such city is Edinburgh. When a friend who used to live in the Grassmarket complained to a councillor about the detrimental effect on the neighbourhood of Airbnbs, and hen and stag parties, he was told: “If you don’t like it, why don’t you move?” He did, and now lives far from madding crowds in Fife.
Italy seems especially blighted by over-tourism. Recently, visitors to Venice have been asked to pay five euros to get their feet wet in Piazza San Marco. So far this appears not to have had the desired effect.
Florentines are likewise discombobulated by the numbers who pour daily into its centro storico. Mass tourism is one of the issues at the forthcoming election for mayor where at least one candidate - Eike Schmidt, the former director of the Uffizi gallery - is concerned with a drop in standards, particularly in relation to food.
Schmidt, who is backed by the far-right Brothers of Italy party, told the Guardian:“There are no tables, toilets, waste bins, people end up sitting down on any steps they find, on monuments or outside the homes of citizens…and throwing greasy papers on the street.”
While sharing some of Signor Schmidt’s chagrin, I can’t help but reflect that, when it comes to tourism, Florence has history. In the days of the Grand Tour, those with the means and unlimited leisure flocked to Italy to soak up culture, drink good wine, harass women and stuff their stately piles with Renaissance masterpieces that could be acquired for a song.
Needless to say, this was not an opportunity that was available to hoi polloi. This began to change in the mid-nineteenth century when Baedeker, the German publisher of guidebooks, demystified travel to foreign climes. By the first decade of the twentieth century, EM Forster, in his novel A Room with a View, titled one the chapters ‘In Santa Croce with no Baedeker’, in which a seasoned visitor tells a new arrival: “I hope we shall soon emancipate you from Baedeker. He does but touch the surface of things. As to the true Italy - he does not even dream of it. The true Italy is only to be found by patient observation.”
Even then, more than a century ago, travellers and locals alike complained that Florence was too crowded and that something must be done about it. What that might be is less clear. Ideally, I suppose, what most of us would like is to enjoy our favourite places without having to put up with other tourists getting in our way. In Forster’s novel, he makes the distinction between those foreigners who have made Florence their home and tourists “who carry in their pockets the coupons of Cook.”
At the heart of such an attitude is good, old-fashioned snobbery, from which Florence suffers as much as its twin city Edinburgh. Another similarity is its attractiveness to writers. In his recently published book, Florence Has Won My Heart: Literary Visitors to the Tuscan Capital, 1750-1950 (Mount Orleans Press), Mark Roberts of the British Institute in Florence relates how, as the Grand Tour became more affordable, writers like George Eliot, Henry James, DH Lawrence, Fyodor Dostoevsky and many more arrived in “the city of flowers”.
Interestingly, Forster, whose novel still charms, spent just a few weeks in Florence in the early years of the last century. Who knows to what extent A Room With a View, and its subsequent 1985 film adaptation by Merchant-Ivory, added to the city’s popularity. A fair bit, I’d guess.
My introduction to it was in the summer of 1990 en route to a rendezvous with Muriel Spark in nearby Arezzo. Pace Catch-22, it was love at first sight. When asked what exactly I loved about it the best I could do was say “everything”: the narrow streets down which only mopeds could scoot, the stout doors built to repel intruders, the lire (3,000 to a pound), ribolitta (a Medici among soups), the Ponte Vecchio which seemed to buckle under the weight of the throng.
It was so hot that only mad dogs and English folk dared venture out in the midday sun. One day, about to combust, I swam in the Arno. It was not perhaps the wisest thing to do, given the level of pollution, but it felt liberating. I had to return, and I have most years. Never again, though, have I been tempted to dip a toe into what Mark Twain said would be “a very plausible river if they would pump some water into it”.