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 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 Station

In honor of the current Italian movie, I Am Love, starring Tilda Swinton, and a character of equal élan, the Italian moderne house in whose marbled splendor much of the movie unfolds, I'll give the next week or so over to one of my favorite buildings in the world (and another example of Italian moderne at its most refined), the supernal Florence train station.