Winter River

The Arno in winter is the color of coffee left too long on the stove — brown, flat, unwelcoming. Not the river of postcards. Not the golden-hour Arno that sells calendars and guidebooks and convinces people to spend August in a city that was not designed for August. January, though. January is when Florence belongs to itself. The tourists have gone home to wherever tourists go — places with reliable heating, I assume — and the city does what it always does in winter: closes early, argues about football, eats ribollita, complains about the cold while refusing to dress for it. I walk along the Lungarno every morning before the shop opens. The shop sells leather goods to people who think they're getting a deal. They're not. But they're happy, and happiness is worth whatever they paid. The river is high this week. Rain in the mountains. The Arno remembers 1966 — the water coming over the walls, oil and mud in the Biblioteca Nazionale, Cimabue's crucifix in the Santa Croce soaking for twelve hours in a brew of heating oil and sewage. The mud angels came. Young people with buckets. They saved what they could. My grandfather was one of them. Twenty-two, a carpenter, up to his waist in the nave passing books hand over hand to the street. He never talked about it as heroic. He said it was wet and the books were heavy and someone gave him grappa afterward and he slept in his clothes and his mother threw the clothes away. The river is below the wall today. It moves at its own pace, carrying whatever the mountains gave it toward Pisa and the sea. I don't trust it. Nobody who lives here trusts it. We live beside it and watch it the way you watch a neighbor who was once arrested but has been fine since. Fine for now. The river doesn't make promises. It just does what water does. We build the walls higher and it rains in the mountains and we see who's right.