Florence Train Station9

 A view from the corner of the train station toward the Duomo in the distance. 

 Certainly one of the themes of I Am Love is the great weight of past glory that presses down on the minds of present-day Italians and that still vibrates through their aesthetic genes.

 A friend observes that all we have now is the new, without the bracing mystique of the new (just look, for a taste of the latter, at the great Karsh portrait of painter Jean-Paul Riopelle in his Paris garret). Not so, however, in Italy, where the new, when not eclipsed by a staggering mountain of regulations, is still tuned to a mysteriously lunar key of elegance, originality and bravado echoing from that particular past. 

 There is a long, strong link between Brunelleschi's dome and the manifold perfections of the train station not a mile away; the same link connects the Renaissance courts of Mantua or Milan with the breezy panache of any Italian hailing a cab today.   

Florence Train Station6

 From the French word for window, fenetre, we get the word fenestration--the use of glass or of windows in a building. Nothing says moderne quicker than wall-wide, light-soaking expanses of glass. One only has to think of the skyscrapers of Mies van der Rohe. 

 Here, a wide ribbon of glass flows forward from the concourse at the back, over the main ticket lobby, then down and over the porch at the front and down, finally, to the ground in one uninterrupted cascade of glass. 

 Inside, there is only luminous, window-gridded sky above, the light drifting down the luscious amber marble walls in waves of intangible honey.  

Florence Train Station5

 Everywhere, luxuriant travertine marble and bronze. The plate of prongs, itself a lovely minimalist sculpture, is meant to keep pigeons away from the window sill. God is in the details. Same goes for the movie I Am Love, where the camera seems as entranced by the beauty and details of incident and place as it is by the progress of the plot, reminding us that love itself is as much an incomparable artifact as it is a dramatic narrative.

Florence Train Station2

 I happened to see this guy sitting up on the roof--a repairman, I assumed, though a bit mysterious, as he was just sitting there, watching me while I was watching him. After I had taken a couple of shots, he took out his cell phone, so I skedaddled. 

 Note the evenly-spaced horizontals in the stonework, recalling Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie Style, with its low profile and long, fluent latitudes graven in stone and brick, as well as the dramatic overhang floating above the sidewalk, unsupported by any vertical posts, emulating the dramatic cantilevers in Wright's houses, most famous of all, his Robie House in Chicago. 

 The great American architect teaches the Florentines a thing or two.