It must be too cold for them.’’

Ashley wants boots for Christmas. Obviously, this is the place.

She finds black boots and brown suede ones. I see a black bag I really admire, don’t need, and manage to resist. Just before everything closes, we dash over to San Marco, the serene monastery with Fra Angelico frescoes in the cells. Jess never has seen it and the twelve angel musicians seem good to look at during this 214

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season. Siesta catches up with us, so we settle into a long lunch at Antolino’s, a righteous trattoria with a potbellied stove in the middle of the room. The menu lists pastas with hare and boar rag ù, duck, polentas and risottos. The waiters rush by with platters of big roasts.

There’s plenty of time for a long walk before the town reopens. Florence! The tourists are gone, or if they’re here, the fine misty rain must keep them inside. We pass the apartment we rented five years ago, when I swore off Florence. In summer, wads of tourists clog the city as if it’s a Renaissance theme park. Everyone seems to be eating. That year, a garbage strike persisted for over a week and I began to have thoughts of plague when I passed heaps of rot spilling out of bins. I was amazed that long July when waiters and shopkeepers remained as nice as they did, given what they had to put up with. Everywhere I stepped I was in the way.

Humanity seemed ugly—the international young in torn T-shirts and backpacks lounging on steps, bewildered bus tourists dropping ice cream napkins in the street and asking, ‘‘How much is that in dollars?’’ Germans in too-short shorts letting their children terrorize restaurants. The English mother and daughter ordering lasagne verdi and Coke, then complaining because the spinach pasta was green. My own reflection in the window, carrying home all my shoe purchases, the sundress not so flattering. Bad wonder-land. Henry James in Florence referred to ‘‘one’s detested fellow-pilgrim.’’ Yes, indeed, and it’s definitely time to leave when one’s own reflection is included. Sad that our century has added no glory to Florence—only mobs and lead hanging in the air.

In early morning, though, we’d walk to Marino’s for warm brioche, take them to the middle of the bridge and watch the silvery celadon light on the Arno. Most afternoons we sat in a café at Piazza Santo Spirito, where a sense of neighborhood still exists even in summer. The sun angling through the trees hit that grand undecorated sculptural facade of Brunelleschi’s, with the boys playing ball beneath it. Somehow it must make a difference to F L O A T I N G W O R L D : A W I N T E R

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grow up bouncing your ball against the wall of Santo Spirito.

Perhaps many who come to Florence in summer are able to find moments and places like this, times when the city gives itself over by returning to itself.

Today, the stony streets take a shine from the mist. We walk right in the Brancacci chapel. No line; in fact, only a half dozen young priests in long black gowns, following an older priest as he points and lectures about the Masaccio frescoes. I haven’t seen Adam and Eve leaving Eden since the vines over their genitals, painted during some fit of papal modesty, were removed and the frescoes cleaned and restored. Shocking to see them lifted out of the film of centuries of candle smoke: all these distinct faces and the chalky rose and saffron robes. Every face, isolated and examined, reveals character. ‘‘I wanted to see what made each one that one,’’ Gertrude Stein said about her desire to write about many lives. Masaccio had a powerful sense of character and narrative and a sharp eye for placing the human in space. A neophyte kneels in a stream to be baptized. Through the transparent water we see his knees and feet. San Pietro flings the basin, showering his head and back with water. All the symbolism of earlier art is abandoned for the cold splash on the boy. Another pleasure is Masaccio’s (and Masolino’s and Lippi’s, whose hands are apparent) attention to architecture, light, and shadow. Here’s Florence as he saw, or idealized it, with the sun falling logically—not the sourceless light of his predecessors—on this cast of characters who surely walked the streets of this city.

We hurry to the six-nineteen train and miss it. As we wait, I mention the black bag I didn’t buy and Ed decides it would be a terrific Christmas present, although we have said we only are buying things for the house. He and Jess literally run back to the shop, halfway across town from the train station. Ashley and I are uneasy when it’s five minutes until departure but here they come, smiling and panting, waving the shopping bag just as the train is announced.

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On Christmas Eve eve, we take off on a quest in Umbria. Ed thinks we must have one of his favorite reds for Christmas dinner, the Sagrantino, impossible to find this far from its origins. I am after the ultimate panettone. I called Donatella, an Italian friend who’s a wonderful cook, and asked if we could make one together, thinking the homemade would be better than the com-mercial ones stacked in colorful boxes in every grocery and bar.

‘‘It takes twenty hours of rising,’’ she says. ‘‘It must rise four times.’’ I remember how many times I’ve killed the yeast when making simple bread. When her mother was small, she tells me, panettone was just ordinary bread with some nuts and dried fruits tucked into the dough. La cucina povera again. ‘‘It’s really best to buy it.’’ She gave me several brands and I picked out one for Francesco’s family. As I was about to take another, a woman buying at the same time told me that the very best are made in Perugia. She wrote the name of a shop, Ceccarani, on a piece of paper. So we are off to Perugia.

Ceccarani’s window display is a full crèche intricately executed in glazed bread dough. Dough must be a good medium; the figures have expressive faces, sheep look woolly, fronds on the palm trees are finely detailed. The nativity scene is surrounded by marzipan mushrooms and panettoni hollowed out on the side.