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| Two statues on the Ponte Santa Trinita |
With good friends
Matias in Sardegna for a 2-week vacation and Brandi long back in the US, and no
other visitors scheduled to arrive, my new best friend became Kendra Gardner
from Philadelphia. Kendra lived in the apartment below Brandi; was a practicing
architect in Florence; was fluent in Italian after living there for five or so
years; and was a tonne of fun to be around.
She was also a link to a large group of ex-pat women (mostly US) who had
come to Firenze and found love.
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| Kendra G at Giardini Monumentali di Palazzo Corsini |
My first
introduction to this group was at an outdoor production of Romeo and Juliet mounted
on by a local English-speaking theatre group.
The show was in the gardens of the Palazzo Corsini (Giardini Monumentali
di Palazzo Corsini) at sundown one hot Saturday evening in July, but
beforehand, theatre goers were encouraged to have a picnic on the grass in
front of the “stage” (which was really just a grassy knoll.) Kendra and I brought enough food to feed an
army, and when everyone had arrived, we pretty much took over one-quarter of
the seating area. The ex-pats with their
Italian husbands were a great group of people, and I was sort of sad to meet
them at the end of my stay. But Kendra
also had a birthday the following week, so we all met again at Borgo Antico in Piazza Santo Spirito for
dinner on Friday July 27th. There were about 20 of us to fête Kendra
and everyone, it seemed, was having a great time. An interesting thing happens when ex-pats and
their husbands get together: they separate by gender – boys at one end of the
table, girls at the other. It was fascinating to watch – and I really didn’t
know where to sit, so I sort of straddled the two solitudes.
As it turned out,
Kendra’s birthday turned out to be my last social outing in Firenze, but there
were lots of final moments to be had in my last days in Italy.
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| The summer sky at dusk - Firenze, July 2012
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