The last time I truly enjoyed Florence

The last time I truly enjoyed Florence

(or: the ghost city I had always dreamed of living in)

The Duomo looked like a stage set abandoned by God.
The Baptistery, a perfect die wedged into emptiness.
No one. No one ruining everything with a baseball cap, a map, a selfie stick.

All images are copyright 2025 by Andrea Bigiarini - All rights reserved.

During lockdown, Florence stopped being an open-air museum and became something purer.
More brutal. More beautiful.
Like it had waited centuries just to shake off the tourists, the backpacks, the rolling luggage, the badly made spritzes.

I walked down Via Calimala with the same reverence you’d have walking into a house right after it’s been robbed.
Silence.

The kind of silence that whistles in your ears and reminds you you're alive.
The kind that makes you think: This is what the world should sound like after everyone finally shuts up.

Via dei Calzaiuoli: stripped bare.

Piazza della Repubblica: theatrical.
Ponte Vecchio: as unsettling as laughter in a morgue.

The closed shops looked like wounds stitched shut with steel and glass.
The pharmacy glowed like a blasphemy in a church.

And the Hotel Savoy felt like a luxury bunker built to survive something that had already killed us all.

I was alone, like everyone else.
But for the first time, it wasn’t loneliness.

It was privilege.
It was the empty stage before the show begins, and I was the only audience allowed in.

Florence, this is how I want to remember you.
Like the last lover before the end of the world: beautiful, ruthless, and finally naked.