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Published: December 12th 2010
My thoughts have been swimming towards the past lately...i've been hovering in warm memories of home in Connecticut, not even of Florence. And because of the holidays coming up, being a new town, new apartment, new life in many ways, I've taken solace in the feelings of comfort and magic that I felt in CT during my childhood/adolescent years.
I've also realized that making a home or nest is not as easy as all that poetic rhetoric describes- an honorable challenge. It's not attached to place, as most say, and yet it's the qualities of that physical place that provide the skeleton upon which we add, build, transform our needs and desires into what we can physically and mentally call "home". I'm not there now, not yet. We'd built a small nest of sort in Florence. Shared experiences dictate that. My original home is Connecticut, in the home I grew up in and where my parents still live, and I dream of visiting it often. I call it my original home because it's the setting of most of my dreams, it's how I eat, how I want to raise children, how I laugh, bake bread, vaccum, wash my hair, these
are all aspects of the 'me' that I am now that were developed THERE. And I recently feel compelled to remember the habits of daily life back then (and most likely now-as time in memory is stagnant)-my mother's fuzzy bathrobe and warm italian bread, her classical music on the AM radio, my father's glasses and bushy eyebrows as he reads in his study, our old piano, warm light and creaking wooden floors, these all seem like reassuring building blocks to me, blocks that I fall back on psychologically as I seek to ground my feet into the earth below me now. Some would tell me to cut myself off from that, that home is ... (this and that, that and this, but always referred to as "where the heart is") and yes I can feel and understand all of these theories and wise sayings, but I'm not going to deny the obstacles of FEELING home when I'm trying to figure out how to put together the first few twigs of this particular nest.
So with this said, I've decided to revisit the past...Florence from almost 2 years ago...and publish them here. Reflections of Florence's architecture, sculpture, sense of design
and pattern, my own identity within it all. And little by little, I'll find my creative way here as well- most likely paralleling my attempt at defining home in Basilicata.
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ann johnson
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art from an American in Florence
Hi, Cristi .... love reading your blog. I have just purchased (a very big gift to myself!) a painting by Eveyln McFarland (an American artist who lives in Florence with her husband, Hunter Eddy .... also an amazing artist). It's called "Boboli Gardens" and has a wonderful, spiritual, dark and mysterious feeling. Will take a photo of it and send it along to you.