The jewel in the Renaissance

‘Remember, signor,’ the gateman at the Uffizi Gallery is reputed to have told the sceptical American tourist who wondered whether it was worth popping in for an hour before lunch; ‘here it is not the paintings which are on trial.’

Florence has never been on trial. It passed the test centuries ago, when America was a land of forest and sage bush. Whatever sins its citizens have committed, the world will never withhold its thanks from a city-state that has come to define civilisation, and still tries to uphold civilisation. The world beats a path to Ghiberti’s baptistry doors but Florence remains Florence: proud, to the point of rudeness and indomitable.

It is best seen in the morning, before the tourists (of whom you are one, never forget) begin to clog the streets. Rise early and walk along the Arno, like countless thousands of pilgrims before you. You may feel as though you are bathing in honey: the Ponte Vecchio; the Uffizi of course, with its incomparable representation of the Florentine Renaissance; the Bargello; the Piazza della Signoria; and all those streets and lanes that connect these landmarks.

Walk by these places at break of day, as the city is coming to life, and, no matter how many times you have been there, you can never ignore the fact that this was where mankind revealed its brightest colours. There was bloodshed, decades of it, as there is in all places where humans try to push along the messy business of civilisation, but there was also a glory that can never pall.

This small city — a small town in Tuscany, as John le Carré might have called it — changed the way people think, paint, sculpt, eat, drink, play, work and live.