Pointing to the Heavens

As Lee and I were sipping vino on our terrace the other evening, engulfed once again by the glory of the Florentine rooftop vista - the spires and cupolas and crosses pointing us all to the heavens – we noticed this little scene on the rooftops.

We are feeling so a part of the scenery by now that we don’t have much need to play tourist. I worked most of Friday, arranging meetings for my return, considering the materials for a home I am designing in Minneapolis. Let’s see…polished nickel or polished chrome…Carrara or Calcutta marble? Then, there is the daily writing, the just-for-me writing or the writing for my editors, stories for the magazines. I use this as a kind of test run. Can I really do this? Can I work from Florence? From anywhere in this virtual world? I don’ t know yet, but love more than anything giving it a try. Nothing makes me happier here than sitting in my chair in our apartment facing the French doors to the terrace, flung open wide during the day, no difference between inner and outer temperature except to be protected from the sun in the room, and writing, thinking, talking, reading. Lee does the same. It is, for me, as good as all the sights outside these four walls.

Last night, I awoke and couldn’t sleep. I got up for a drink of water and on my way back to bed my eyes passed the window that looks onto the Cappelle Medice – the Medici Chapels. I climbed up on my bed because the window is high, leaned my chin onto the sill and looked at the night sky. It was navy blue, filled with stars. To the left is the bell tower and just beyond that is Il Duomo. All this out our window and only the tops of it because we are on the 5th floor. They are lit as if by magic. The forms, all pointing to God, hang in the night sky like a movie set more than anything believable in my Midwestern world of sensible forms - of farms and silos and barns that live in the earth, of glass and iron and concrete buildings that scrape the sky, but never point to it.