Continuing our 3 day city guides, Lydia Manch heads to Florence; for old-world luxury at the five star Hotel Lungarno, and old-world brutality at the city’s Calcio Storico semi-finals…
Saturday
We arrive into dusk on the Saturday, and spend our first evening at The Fusion Bar & Restaurant (reviewed here), and walking through the city. Mostly we just wander hand in hand, with no particular goal – dazed from the journey, and the summer evening’s warmth, dazed by the beers and late-night buzz of Brewdog Firenze, and, tracing our way back afterwards, dazed from the surreal effect of the statues, beautiful and majestic, towering everywhere in our path.
Sunday
We start as we don’t really mean to go on – with high-culture at the Uffizzi, where the sheer number of artworks crammed into every corner brings back the same wide-eyedness we felt wandering the streets the night before. We wait out a sudden thunderstorm with the wine and antipasti of Konnubio for company, before heading back to our hotel.
Hotel Lungarno’s one of four Ferragamo hotels in Florence, and our Prestige Arno View Room’s all five star luxury in a classic mould, stately chairs and gilded fittings. But to be honest, some of that’s wasted effort. You could claim all five of those stars based on the view alone. Our balcony opens onto the Arno, two floors above one of the most iconic views in Florence, one hundred metres from the medieval beauty of Ponte Vecchio to the right, and the Renaissance arches of Ponte Sante Trinita to the left.
This is, of anywhere we visit in Florence, the place most likely to keep us indoors. There’s blazing sunshine outside, the Arno is glittering; Florence is radiant and filled with gelato and I have something specific and pretty strange booked for Ric’s birthday this afternoon – but Hotel Lungarno makes it so tempting to stay a bit longer in our room. We lean against the stone edge of the balcony and each other, generally muted by beauty, and debate ordering room service wine and never leaving.
But eventually we do emerge, because however lovely the room is it’s not as full of ice cream as Perche no! gelateria. And so – via gelato, apparently the best pizza al trancio in town (Pizzeria Toto) and a glass of wine on some rickety stools outside Lo Schiacciavino – we arrive at 4pm, and at Piazza Santa Croce. Home, this weekend, to the Calcio Storico Fiorentino semi-finals, a Renaissance-era mix of football and fierce, few-holds-barred combat.
In one of Florence’s most beautiful, ancient squares, this weekend the Basilica di Croce’s looking down over a long field of sand and bleachers running along each edge of the piazza. Calcio Storico begins with a procession, a vast, elaborate parade of men, children, horses, flag bearers and drummers, in 16th century Florentine costume.
The sun beats down. We drink Spritzes from the bars edging the piazza; a speech about the history of Calcio Storico booms from the speakers, mostly focusing on the 16th century roots and skipping lightly over the Mussolini-era resurrection. Forza Bianchi banners are unfurled along the edge of our bleachers, where we sit just inside the white team’s section. And then the calcianti take to the field.
In Calcio Storico 27 men in each team square up against each other: ceremonially, and brutally. This is a powerful reminder that despite the old-school Merchant Ivory-ish feel of Hotel Lungarno, not all that’s historic in Florence is delicate or refined. The rules preclude little apart from two-on-one attacks and blows to a man already on the ground. The players are a mix of men the size, shape and solidity of your average family fridge, and others that are lean wires, just fury held together by sinew.
Some are your grandad’s age, though less grandfatherly than they might seem if they weren’t repeatedly punching someone in the chest. Some look too young to grow a beard. None of them look anything less than hard as nails.
Blue and white smoke sweeping the bleachers from flares, the players kick each other, punch each other, thud into each other like meteorites hitting earth. They wrestle each other to the ground and stay down, pinned in lockholds.Two players are carried off on stretchers within 40 minutes of it starting. A lot of blood gets spilled.
When the Bianchi win, their fans storm the pitch. Huge, tattooed men are weeping on the ground, their foreheads pressed into the sand of the pitch at their team’s loss.
The commentator keeps repeating in Italian over the loudspeakers, ‘It would be lovely if everybody would leave the pitch so that we can hear the victory song of the Bianchi team.’
That never happens.
The rest of the evening gets swamped in exuberance, the streets full of celebrating Bianchi. We defect briefly to Trattoria Dell’Orto for dinner, before heading back to the Oltrarno quarter. This is the heart of Bianchi territory – centring around Piazza Santo Spirito – and at any time of year it’s the best place in Florence to head for outdoor drinking, loud music and messy, late nights. The Santo Spirito victory’s heightened all of those things, to the point where the whole piazza’s heaving with music and people spilling out of the bars, banners being shaken, and scattered through with the white tracksuits and battered faces of the team.
It’s in Cabiria bar we re-meet Andy Sledge, who befriended us on the plane over a shared interest in great pasta and brutal football, and who introduces us to James Zikic. The sole foreign player on the Bianchi team, Zikic has an MMA background, and he’s been with the Bianchi for several years now. His only concession to the afternoon’s ultraviolence is that he’s sitting down for a minute; he’s not injured, he says, but ‘might feel it tomorrow’. Something you’d be inclined to take as massive understatement if he didn’t have an air of being immovable like a knot.
We ask him about the players carted off on stretchers, and he tells us that one of those was his doing, but neither are badly hurt. He must be hiding a spectrum of bruising under his tracksuit, but seems unbothered. We all chat over a drink, as though he hasn’t spent the afternoon locked in some of the most vicious fighting you can see outside of an Iko Uwais film.
When my sidekick and I slope off for a nightcap and early night, the Bianchi are still going. Zikic heads back into the fray, shaming us with his ability to still be standing, when between the heat and the adrenaline and the free-flowing wine – plus the call of our balcony – we’re pretty much out for the count.
Monday
We start the morning at a slow pace, because nothing about Hotel Lungarno encourages you out of bed early. But after a breakfast that ruins me for any hotel buffet that doesn’t come with pistachio-filled pastries and a view over the Arno, we head north over the river.
What’s left of the morning we spend at Trattoria Zaza, toasting Ric’s birthday and the halfway marker in our stay – everything merits a toast in Florence – and then at the Mercato Centrale sheltered market, a 19th century wrought-ironwork, glass-ceilinged monument to good eating.
This next part is strictly speaking, cheating, because we leave Florence. But only just: Prato might be another town but it’s twenty minutes away from Firenze’s Santa Maria Novella station, faster than Shepherd’s Bush to Shoreditch and so, we decide, it’s allowed.
And there’s good reason to bend the rules a bit, for the sake of a journey through Tuscan countryside and a behind-the-scenes at a Tuscan craft brewery.
Cristiano at I Due Mastri‘s invited us in to show us what they’ve been doing with their warehouse space, and what they’ve been brewing. We get a whirlwind tour of their operation, and then a very much less whirlwind tasting session, bottles of their Guru pale ale and malty Glencoe Scotch ale poured out on an impromptu table of a keg and flattened boxes. A lot of toasts get made – general toasts to the flourishing of Italian beer, more specific toasts to the Mastri’s future plans for expansion, export and a Prato taproom.
Arriving back in Florence in the afternoon we stick to the Tuscan craft beer theme, stopping off at some of the city’s best brewpubs, among them King Grizzly, the Archea Brewery taproom, and some of the bars circling Santo Spirito we didn’t get to the night before. From there we wind along backstreets to O’Munaciello, a Neapolitan pizzeria in an ex-nunnery, where the brilliance of the pizza’s matched only by the weirdness of the statuary, enormous angels in flight looming out of the shadows above our table.
Walking back through the Oltrarno’s narrow alleys, Ric proposes a last drink, to give Santo Spirito the honour of a proper goodbye. At Cabiria that one last drink gets upgraded to something a lot fiercer, the bartender pushing a plastic pint glass of negroni over to each of us.
Even at midnight the air’s just starting to cool. We sit on the wide edge of the fountain in the piazza, stone still warm to the touch, and drink our pints of negroni with more courage than caution. Maybe some of the fearless, No-Tomorrows spirit of Team Bianchi’s rubbed off on us. Or maybe, knowing that the three days are dangerously close to being over, we just want to spin the evening out even longer.
Tuesday
With less than a day left – plus a big need for breakfast after the Negroni-pints of the night before – we make it out of bed earlier than yesterday, in time to be towered over by Michaelangelo’s David at Galleria dell’Accademia before the tourist crowds hit with a vengeance.
By lunchtime we’re exploring the Mercato di Sant’Ambrogio’s hectic, covered food market before heading for lunch at the quieter haven of Semel, a tiny, open-fronted panineria opposite the market – only open around lunchtime, so time it carefully if you want their famous crusty rolls of wild boar and blackberry or anchovy, pear and pecorino.
Tiny glasses of chinotti and some people-watching later, and we leave for a last walk across the city. We also manage a pitstop at the Il Mostodolce taproom for beer flavoured with chestnuts and honey, a late Tuscan summer crammed into a few hundred millilitres of dark amber. It’s with a mix of regretfulness and relief we decide there’s not enough time to order Birramisú, their ale-steeped tiramisu dessert, before catching our train onwards to Bologna.
Leaving Florence feels like a wrench almost as brutal as some of the things we saw go down at Calcio Storico. It’s some consolation that the city’s beauty and brutality have lasted centuries and must be pretty durable. So surely Ponte Vecchio and Calcio Storico, the nights in Santo Spirito and and the horrifying statues at O’Munaciello will still be there, waiting for us, next year.
Calcio Storico Fiorentino takes place every year in Piazza Santa Croce. The 2016 final will be Bianchi vs Azzurri, and will take place on 24th June. Tickets are available to purchase online.
I Due Mastri beers are available to order in the UK through Delicatezza.
Hotel Lungarno is a Lungarno Collection Hotel on the banks of the Arno. A Prestige Arno River View Room starts at 522 Euros per night in June for 2 adults, excluding taxes and fees.
Hotel Lungarno, Borgo S. Jacopo, 14, 50125 Firenze, Italy. For booking and enquiries please call 0039 05527261 or visit www.lungarnocollection.com.
