I'm coming to the end of my time here in Firenze. I've been working here for the last month as a tour guide in the Duomo of Florence.
As a mental exercise, just imagine the typical tourist's day in the city:
You pull up your socks, buckle up your bum bag and head out early, ready to take the day by the horns. But after a couple of hours you're getting irate — you can't find a toilet and are struggling to locate that 'famous' pizzeria that your friend (who visited Florence 30 years ago) recommended.
And if that isn't bad enough, it turns out that that famous painting of the Last Supper (who painted it again?) isn't in Florence as you thought, it's in Milan, where you were last week. Damn. So why on earth did you bother coming to Florence? I mean, what's here? (anything else from The Da Vinci Code?) And what can you get for free?
But all is not quite lost. There's still Michelangelo's David in the Academia — that's 'famous' and always makes for a good Facebook album cover. But after queuing for two hours, you feel rather underwhelmed — David isn't the 20m high statue of a ripped male you had been expecting, and there isn't a secret passageway leading from his gluteus maximus to a torture chamber beneath the Vatican.
So, after a hasty and overpriced pizza, you decide to just seek out the biggest, no nonsense building you can find and go in there — generally, it's that one that you see in the middle of the piazza with the big dome. So, slurping down the rest of that gelato, proudly smearing your face with chocolate and hazelnut, you queue up and enter.
And that's where you meet me, with a smile on my face and a twinkle in my eye.
Now, after this small exercise you might think that my job involves being martyred several times a day.
But actually it's full of wonderful moments — it's been a great chance to think and to learn.
Not long ago I was gardening in an orchard in the hills above the city. We were eating wild plums while we worked in the sun. It would have been quite the Tolstoyan scene, like Levin reaping the hay with his peasants, in search of truth and meaning through manual labour, if it weren't for the regular breaks and the constant plum eating.
If