“Perceiving the city as something created together with the river and the surrounding hills is the only way to escape the ‘Florence syndrome’: there is such a term in psychiatry that means a nervous breakdown from the abundance of works of art.” Peter Weill, “The Genius of the Place”
There is another way: limit the gluttony of the eye with the eyepiece of the camera. Checked – it helps. But only in part, because even cropped Florence penetrates the soul and brain, displacing everything else. Because Florence is not a sterile museum, carefully cleared of all signs of life, but a way of art’s existence in time and in a limited space.
The doors and gates of buildings in Florence, as a rule, are closed, suggesting conjectures, fantasizing. But there is not enough time for this. The only thing that you have time to do is examine the knocker, and you run further to get stuck at the next door, because it is different and the knocker is different, sometimes from a completely different era… This is how a whole collection was formed.
Sergey Falkin