TFI - Travel - Italy - Florence

As part of a 'Four Point' tour (Florence or Firenze as they call it in Italian, Pisa, Venice and Rome) one fine morning I landed in Florence with a bunch of my friends. Early morning, sunlight beaming on all the buildings that still stand for Renaissance time (the Duomo, the Uffizi, the bell tower, etc....) and giving them an ethereal glow. I swallowed the sights of Florence through the lens of my precious camera, a 1980 manual Mamiya ZM E, a great one - they don't make cameras like this anymore - a complete role of 36 frames finished after half a day of 'feeling' like a renaissance man. 

I snapped Micheal Angelos' David in splendid light, the city plan drawn by Da Vinci (plan of an area, marked down to the tiniest details - all just be visualisation and geometry!!!), priceless renaissance art by the likes of Da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Titian, Raphael to name a few, the hulk of a building called the Duomo (the Dome), the intricately carved Bell Tower, Tombs of  Michael Angelo, Galileo Galilei (yes, THE Galileo!), Machaivalli to name a few giants and anything else that I could lay my eyes upon.

Satiated, I took out the film spool and put it safely in my back pack and our group moved out to a smaller place called Olympic, found a park and unwound a bit. There I was, sitting in a small grassy patch, with my backpack - well, just behind me. Just few minutes passed by, I reached for my bag on an instinct and it was gone already! Somebody flicked it!!! I couldn't believe that it happened, the priceless pictures that I took - gone! 

We searched around, asked a few people but could not find it. Complaining to local police did not seem a wise idea as we were on a very tight schedule and had to travel to another town (Pisa, famed for its Leaning Tower) that very afternoon. I was immensely sad thinking that I lost priceless memories - gone with that role! In fact I was going crazy to the extent of appealing to 'thief like' guys I could spot in the park and beg for just that one role of film...My sensitive friends consoled me - I was the lead photographer - and we moved on.

Later on, I realised that I did not actually lose even a single picture - they all stay in my mind. Well, I may not be able to show to my friends or hang them in nice frames in a well decked hall or something like that but every single frame I focussed and snapped, stay focussed in my minds' eye. All I had to do to 'see' them is to close my eyes and they come flooding back, including the minutest of the details - the way the sling rested on David's shoulder, his gait, the slight curve in his back, the color of the Duomo, the specks of light that reflected from the glass panels on its top, the intricate carvings on the bell tower...in fact each and every detail of each lost frame is still intact in me! This realisation helped me to gain an altogether different perception - that how you relate to something is much more important than just seeing it / taking a picture of it...

If you think about it, you may also realise that we (may) never have any pictures of the best moments of our lives - we would have been so immersed in those moments that we wouldn't have thought about anything else...Could a picture of a newborn bring back the joy we felt when we received the tiny bundle in our own hands? I guess not!

Still, I could find some nice pictures in public domain that came close to the snaps I took and am gladly sharing them with you here :-)

(David - Photo Courtesy Rico Heil http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Silmaril) 

I would say a trip to Florence is well worth your time, in fact, well worth your life!