“This might be the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” they say.
When you spend four years studying Renaissance art and architecture with a special focus on southern Europe, you inevitably find yourself in romantic love with the Duomo di Firenze—the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore, the Florence Cathedral, the Duomo. I’ve dreamed of standing here. I knew, intellectually, that it would be nearly three times the height of Notre-Dame and one and a half times the size. I’ve read about every elaborate detail, from the architecture Brunelleschi invented to make the dome physically possible to the hundreds of thousands of intricate green, pink, and white marble panels placed by hand to adorn the exterior. And still, it shocks me.
It reminds me of a cake. Gum-paste details for the window tracery, sugar lace for the foliage over the portals, precise layers of vanilla and raspberry and pistachio joconde for the polychrome marble. Like the Tower of Pisa, I can only understand the Duomo in terms of dessert.
“I can’t believe people made this,” I exhale. “I can’t believe I get to see it.”
Theo turns to me.
“Haven’t you—I thought you’d already been to Italy?”
“Only Venice.”
“Oh. So, the rest of the places on the tour will be new to us both?”
I forgot they don’t know.
“They’ve all been new to me, except Paris, and I went to Nice once when I was five,” I say. “We were supposed to go to these places together. It felt wrong to go without you.”
Theo bites their lip, eyes hidden behind dark glasses. I think of the sudden hardness of their voice in Paris, when they said they could’ve gone without me. I believed them then, but now—je ne sais pas.
Finally, they say, “Do you wanna see something interesting?”
“Hard to imagine anything more interesting than what I’m looking at right now.”
“What about four people sharing one cone of gelato?”
I blink. “What?”
I follow their gaze to a gelato stand where the Calums, Dakota, and Montana are passing around a single runny cone of stracciatella.
“Ooh.” I frown approvingly as Ginger Calum tongues down the cone, then holds it out to Montana to give her a taste. “They’re in the Italian spirit.”
“I wouldn’t do that with someone unless I was fucking them,” Theo says. “The two girls they were talking about, the ones who had a threesome with Blond Calum . . . do you think they meant Dakota and Montana?”
Dakota licks a streak of chocolate off Blond Calum’s hand, and I have to hold my applause. Sluts forever. “Good for them, then. Looks like they’re figuring it out.”
“Maybe they settled the score,” Theo suggests. “Maybe we’re not the only ones who got some action in Cinque Terre.”
We find Fabrizio at our meeting point in the piazza, arguing with another guide in vehement Italian over the best spot in front of the cathedral. He finishes with fire in his eyes and afuck offgesture of his hand under his chin, but he gets the spot he wanted, which instantly puts him back in a good mood.
“Buongiorno, amici!” he shouts, clapping his hands. “We will begin our walking tour of Firenze? Sì? I think today, because we have many lovers in our group”—I swear his eyes land mischievously on mine—“I want to take you on a special tour of thepassionof Florentine history. The secret affairs, the betrayals, the great loves, the scandals. What do you think? Yes? Andiamo!”
We begin at the cathedral, Fabrizio’s voice smooth as he explains every intentional panel and detail, the contrasting stripes of red marble from Siena, green from Prato, white from Carrara. He points up to where a scorned stonemason secretly mounted a bull’s head with its horns pointing at a tailoring shop owned by his lover’s husband. Then he ushers us away to Palazzo Pazzi, arugged palace once home to the powerful Pazzi family, who conspired to stab the even more powerful Medici princes to death at the altar of the Duomo in the middle of Easter Sunday mass. On its exterior is a small door around chest level, a wine window left over from the plague days, which Theo finds so delightful they stay behind to get a good photo for the Somm.
The next stop is—whoa.
The old alleys are so close and gnarled, Piazza della Signoria seems to open wide out of nowhere. It sprawls in a lake of black stone, clusters of tourists swirling like schools of fish. Directly ahead, water erupts from a majestic white marble fountain embellished with bronze figures of fauns and satyrs, a huge, powerful sculpture of a nude man borne on a shell-shaped chariot at its center.
“The Fountain of Neptune!” Fabrizio announces with a flourish.
I’ve beheld the cheeks of a thousand nude sculptures, and yet I swear this is an extraordinarily hot rendition of Neptune. Maybe it’s the ambient horniness, but the full, muscular ass on this Neptune is—
“Bodacious,” Theo pants, breathless from running to catch up. “That ass is bodacious.”
I turn to see Theo flushed with exertion, shadows of perspiration beginning to show through their shirt. Ambient horniness, buongiorno.
“Sì, very sexy!” Fabrizio says. “So sexy, the sculptor eventually denounces this Neptune and his other nude sculptures for leading people to sin.”