Piazza di Porta San Giovanni

It is early morning of the week when the first scooters begin their carefully choreographed carbon dioxide dance through the streets of Florence and when the sun hasn't yet decided which shade of yellow to wrap the city in, that I enjoy the Piazza di Porta San Giovanni the most. As the veins of the city slowly fill and flow with travellers of all kinds, birds and jackhammers confuse each other with sound. What amazes me about the Piazza, is its ability to contain life, to merge all pathways into one, collecting stories that seem to float effortlessly along the cobbled stones that have been polished by centuries of scuffing feet. It is here that the massive Duomo confidently dominates the city with elephantine grandeur. Like a sleeping lion this giant of green and white stone seems to guard all the secrets that carry the weight of too much history.

Here the threads that string masses of people through the narrow streets of the city get confused and tangled into a web of culture and sound. When human voices converge something magical happens to the space they inhabit. If one listens carefully then, above the polluted rumbles of modernity above the mosaic of language, one can hear the gentle whispers of a city that has gathered and preserved all the stories remembered over centuries.