Hidden connections Collecting postcards.

I am a drunk soul venturing Florence's dark alleys. The wine tricks me: my senses grow stronger to their full potential only to fade away a couple of seconds afterwards. Exceptionally, I am drunk and I feel guilty about it. It feels like I am somehow lacking of respect for the ‘cradle of Renaissance’. I feel like a lover contemplating the most attractive woman of the world under the effects of alcohol. I can't help it, but it feels like I am disavowing its beauty. I walk along an anonymous street behind the big sights. The rows of yellow buildings running on both tower over the darker row of motorcycles and vespas parked in a neat line. All of a sudden, out of a magic trick, the city sets free an army of tiny black stickmen chasing red heart-shaped balloons. A street artist has released them to befriend alert wanderers. They run on the old, scraped walls, carried away by red hearts, climbing up long, thin, ladders to catch them, or stretching out trying to pick one. Florence’s old walls speak, they tell you stories about love, escape and hope. They hide everywhere, you just need to look around: and here they are, popping up beneath a window sill, next to a door, hanging from the rusty hinges of an old gate. Enter. Exit. Fly away. Their favourite spots are the limbos, uninteresting places in-between world known gems. Yes, Florence is all about art - what it is, how it has changed, what it does. But unexpectedly, the answers to these questions lie outside the Uffizi and the Galleria dell'Accademia. They lie in the amazed smile of a passer-by who sees, among the ruins of habit, the simplest of graffitis surfacing on that very wall, on that very day, as a reminder that we are all interconnected by a network of memories, emotions and desires, a thin thread holding the people of the city together. I keep walking in this anonymous alley at 2 am. More stickmen stand by me, still and quiet on the wall. I look for them and start playing the game concealed throughout the city. I have a map with me: I mark their spots with red dots, as red as the big hearts flying from one wall to another. When I leave, I think back of the encounters I have now welcomed among my memories. I leave, and I think I have found a tiny piece of the city’s soul lying underground beneath houses and churches, in the streaming water of the Arno, in two local lovers kissing on Ponte Vecchio, all enclosed in a sketch on the wall, a stickman flying on his heart-shaped balloon.