Dead Season

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The city is dead in August. There is movement, but it’s not life.

By day the cruise groups still crawl the streets, slower and slower as the heat intensifies, filing like ants from the Palazzo Vecchio to Santa Croce, their queues snaking around the Duomo and under the arcades of the Uffizi, trying to find shade. The shops beyond the tourist centre are shuttered and silent, the restaurants closed. By day it is bad enough: by night it is a ghost of a place and the tall palaces along the Via dei Bardi, north of the Duomo, and behind Santo Spirito stand even more silent than usual.

There are pockets, on the city’s fringes, where those too poor to escape the heat congregate in the shadows, the Senegalese and Nigerian traders, the travellers, the dispossessed. There is the African market, tucked in between the bridge of San Niccolo on the city’s eastern edge, the embankment and the green flow of the river below — or there was. Earlier this summer there has been a drive among the city’s combined police forces to move the various itinerants along to some other and less visible meeting place; like almost all such moves, its effects will be temporary. The sellers of painted gourds and chipped Nubian heads and tasselled sandals will come back, to sell and to talk, to cook on improvised barbecues and drink sickly canned orange under the scrub oak, the air clouded with mosquitoes from the river below. But for now the place is deserted, or almost.

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