II.xvii. Nacht Zug

"I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to horses."
- Emperor Charles V

The train that took me to Florence for a second time, on Saturday morning, is a transalpine invader. It is in fact a Deutsche Bahn sleeper train en route from Munich and the Brenner Pass, making its penultimate stop in Bologna. As the Italians have intelligently renamed the Bavarian capital into a more palatable Monaco, one could be mistaken and think that the train hailed from the French Riviera, but this is not the case, as is belied by the German built and labelled train carriages that generally seem to be cleaner than those operated by the Forrovie dello Stato.
    This train, costing only 3.95 Euros for the Bologna to Florence segment, is by far the cheapest option. It is approximately two thirds cheaper than the Eurostar, Italy's premium and supposedly high-speed train, which is only ten minutes faster in this case. Of course, the Nacht Zug train only passes through Bologna relatively early before spending the day at the train station in Florence and heading back northwards again around ten o'clock at night. This schedule suits me very well, as Florence in the morning is at least somewhat devoid of the crowds of tourists that mar it progressively throughout the day. Though it was late October, there were still a considerable number of visitors in the city, but Florence is a city of almost infinite treasures and it is possible to find some solitude if one knows where to seek it.
    A few hundred metres from the train station, then, is the first of many poorly frequented hidden masterpieces of the Tuscan capital; the Cenacolo di Fuligno. All that is left of this once thriving monastery is its enormous dining hall, decorated with a single glorious fresco of the Last Supper painted by Perugino. I rung at the unmarked door that is the Cenacolo's entrance and an elderly custodian let me in, free of charge, into the enormous hall. There was only one other person there at the time, an art student who was sketching the figure of Saint John in a peaceful, quiet trance.
    But today I did not have the luxury of spending the hours I would wish gazing at this tiny, though beautiful, fragment of Florentine art. I went on to visit several other frescoed halls, remnants of old convents, before venturing on to San Marco, the peaceful resting place for the majority of the life work of the blessèd angelic painter, Fra Angelico. He painted in the sweetest, purest, simplest, most gentle style imaginable, and the centuries have remembered him as a man who reflected his art. Such contrast this was to Savonarola, the fiery Dominican preacher who was eventually to exercise an iron grip on this convent some fifty years after Angelico's death.
    And after these sights yet more. Florence is interminable. Its inexhaustibility only adds to mine, and I still managed to have the energy to visit the Medici Palace, the Accademia Gallery, and the Pitti Palace before I returned to Bologna for the night.




Perugino's Last Supper, at the Cenacolo di Fuligno


Fra Angelico's Annunciation, at the Convent of San Marco


The chapel of the Medici-Riccardi palace in Florence, with frecoes by the most successful of Fra Angelico's students, Benozzo Gozzoli