Florence by David Leavitt Read Free Book Online

effect of making meat seem quite repellent, especially beef, which in such a temperature one can hardly bear to look at, let alone eat’.
    If today Florence is as famous for its immense steaks ( bistecche alla Fiorentina ) and slabs of roast pork ( arista , a name derived, Norman Douglas tells us, from the Greek word for ‘excellent’) as it is for its vegetables, this is largely thanks to refrigeration. And yet vegetables continue to form the bulwark of the Florentine diet: chicory sautéed with hot peppers and garlic, white beans served at room temperature with fresh olive oil and pepper, cardoons ( cardi ) baked with cheese in a white sauce, not to mention the city’s famous soups: pappa al pomodoro , a simple tomato soup thickened with bread, and ribollita – literally, ‘reboiled’, since the dish was traditionally prepared with the leftovers of a previous meal. A good ribollita is made with beans, carrots, onions, cabbage, hot red pepper, and leaves of Tuscan black cabbage, the whole thickened, as in pappa al pomodoro , with stale unsalted bread. Indeed, so mythic is this soup that at Cocco Lezzone, a Florentine trattoria said tobe favored by Prince Charles, a note at the top of the menu warns patrons that ‘the ringing of the cellular telephone may disturb the cooking of the ribollita ’.
    Of course, few of the original Anglo-Florentines ate ribollita, or anything else Italian: instead they depended on British shops to provide them with the staples necessary to approximate the dishes of home. At Lord Acton’s, high tea was the customary social entertainment, with famously thin sandwiches. Even today, one can easily find Twining’s tea, Walker’s shortbread and Marmite in Florence, as shopkeepers cater to the English expatriate’s nostalgia for home – a nostalgia that sometimes seems to border on xenophobia.
    Their attitude toward dogs put them no less in conflict with the Italians, who even today tend to treat their dogs less as pets than as working animals. Indeed, the Anglo-Florentines may have introduced the idea of the cane di compania (the ‘companion dog’) into Italy. Vernon Lee’s mother, Lady Paget, claimed to have settled in Florence because British quarantine laws did not permit her to take her beloved dachshund back to England. (She alsomade her own shoes.) Ouida owned dozens of dogs, which she was reputed to feed lobster, petits-fours and cream from Capodimonte teacups. An alternate version of her feud with Janet Ross, offered by Moorehead, puts the dogs at the center of the conflict; after one of them bit her son, Ross had the dog punished, provoking Ouida to retaliate by portraying Lady Joan Challoner as a dog hater.
    Florence remains, by Italian standards, a remarkably dog-friendly city. When we lived there, we used to have frequent encounters with a madwoman who wore a white coat over her nightgown and could be seen every morning and every evening in the Piazza della Signoria, walking four dogs on four leads: small, nervous mongrels, one black, one brindled, one the color of unwashed sheets, and one pink, with a pink nose and an under-bite. To any passing stranger who patted the dogs’ heads, or even smiled at them, this woman would try to give one away, yet she never seemed to find a taker. She would haul them around for a while, then, quite suddenly, let them go; leaping, they’d spread out over the piazza, like the fingers of a splayed hand,riding the crest of some race memory in which they frolicked with leopards whose spots formed tiny fleurs-de-lis, and wriggled between the legs of knights (one purple, one white), and urinated against trees the foliage of which rose up in staggered tiers, like the tiers of the metal platters that display coconut slices at Italian station bars, and which a drizzle of water moistens. Such furious little dogs, which have been breeding in Florence since its beginnings, can be found in Benozzo Gozzoli’s frescoes in the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi, as