The local scene

We are staying on a low ridge top between Florence and further out the A1 motorway. We are actually opposite Galileo’s old villa, Il Gioiello, where he lived his later life having moved from his natal town of Pisa and a university post at Padua. And two houses up is the ex PM Giovani Spadolini’s house and his library of 80,000 volumes which is open to the public. Then the Torre del Gallo, the very much functioning Osservatorio Galileo and lower down the Medici villa of Poggio Imperiale, now a state college and base of the VIII squadra mobile of the Polizia di Stato.

As you can imagine it has been a hectic and yet slightly becalmed week after the sale finally went through. After the Casentino even this backwater of Florence has, as they say here, ‘troppo confusione’.

Today I walked down into the steep ramshackle valley that is home to less salubrious dwellings. It was a miserable day, wet and slippery and on these tiny roads you have to be super-aware of cars and that van and those Fiat 500s.Blind pends and barely room to hug a wall and all that.

(I’ve edited this post because the tragic scene I came across just seemed too awful to report. Suffice to say that in In these times of sadness, tragedy and wanton indifference I was shocked to the core.)