una capanna in Firenze

I once lived in the east end of Florence, almost at the verge of the city. It was a gritty district at the time, although you wouldn't know it by day. You could walk out of the city, and if you took the right route, find yourself in above the valley in Settignano, where Michelangelo imbibed marble dust with his mother's milk.

Or you could walk left out of the city, through the new suburbs and the power lines, and turn up in places where neither Michelangelo, the Medici, or any of the gilded apparatus of the capital of the Renaissance should ever trouble your head.