Florence
Earlier, when I was teaching in Florence, I would eat almost every day at "La Pentola dell'oro" in the Via Mezzo. Giuseppe Alessi, the chef-proprietor and resident philosopher of this excellent restaurant, confided in me one evening:
Man grows, fruit ripens. A meal must ripen too. I have it ripen at night, when people are sleep and they're not eating.
In this establishment I had enjoyed many lasting encounters.
Augusto, the head of a university, who had fallen in love with a Japanese student. Roko, a Japanese woman pianist who that year played Mozart ceaselessly. Andrea, an American who claimed to be creating a "cucina mondiale" (I could feel globalisation was quite near). Martina, who used to drive every weekend to her boyfriend in Rimini, so as to do his washing. Remo the framer from whom I commissioned a picture frame made of washing line and clothes pegs. For Martina. I gave Martina the clothes-peg picture. The following weekend the relationship broke up. Martina was no longer to be seen at the "Pentola". Lejla, who fled to Italy during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina and who was having her late father's pictures framed by Remo. Raffaella, who believed that the emotional tension between two people can disturb the weather and even provoke violent gales and heavy seas.
Friendships too ripen at night.
