Travel: Florence, Innocents and a Hungry Throng.
Swallows sweep across the piazza in the morning light. I woke to the sound of their murmuring movement. We have come to Florence and settled in an elegant hotel on the Piazza della Santissima Annunziata. Our windows face northeast over the piazza and the peach blue dawn light paired with swallows swooping beckoned me out onto the steps of the Spedale degli Innocenti on the eastern side of the piazza to sit, drink cappuccino and say my prayers.
The Spedale degli Innocenti was the first orphanage in Europe. Now along with being a museum I assume it must house a day care. As I sit here, several young parents dressed to the hilt, carry sweet toddlers into the building, and then the parent rushes out alone. I love watching the way the parents and children interact; the movements of habit and love. This is a poignant place to watch familial love, for under the long porch in which I sit, there is a window with a grate, behind this grate there is a wheel. Historically, as the wheel turned a cradle cavity would open and if you were desperate and if you had no resources to care for your infant you could place a tiny baby through a grate, into the waiting cradle, turn the wheel and say goodbye. In the 1800’s the number of children left here skyrocketed as high as 1000 in a year; heart ache. In Florence the name for an orphan is Innocenti ; innocent, Innocenti is a beautiful name for those who have lost so much. Even when there were so many, were they treated preciously, gently, because of this truthful title?
When I search for the answer, I find that the window with the rotating wheel was designed so that when the parent turned the wheel, the sound summoned help and the babies were immediately brought anonymously into the warmth of the building. The parent and child kept safe. Within the building there were statues of Mary and Joseph which flanked the crib of the arriving infant. Upon their entrance to the Spedale degli Innocenti the innocenti became Jesus. All the newborns entrusted the hospital were taken in by wet-nurses. These women took all the objects and messages left with the little ones and made careful documentation of them. Many of these mementos are still housed in the museum. One guide says that the children were given these tokens of love as they grew up in order to help them know themselves.
I did not know all of this as I sat in my new dress on the steps of the Spedali degli Innocenti, in the morning light, listening to the swallows, watching families say tender goodbyes. We never explored this place, I only sat on the steps in the morning. We spent the day in the press of tourists within the Duomo of Florence with its white, green, pink marble grandeur. The lines to get into the Cathedral stretched across the massive square. In a secular world why are the beautiful cathedrals so full of souls hungry to see? What is seen? Does what is seen and known within these places still have a relationship to the wheel that brought the innocents into the cradle between Mary and Joseph?
There is a tension in travel, travelling is a privilege, traveling presumes upon others and it presumes profoundly upon the environment. Discernment, gratitude and a sense of limits need to be with me as I go and I don’t know yet how to live with integrity in this. And it is extraordinary what you can see when you travel and it is wonderful how what you see and experience shapes your mind and memory. I loved Florence, I don’t know if I will ever see it again, but it is with me now. I see the swallows and the soft sun between the buildings, I feel the throng of hunger present in the Duomo as I sit and pray on my own steps; and now I reckon with a 1000 children left within a grate on a wheel to be taken in and cared for by Joseph and Mary.
In the museum of the Convent of St. Marco we saw the monk’s cells. Each one had a fresco by Fra. Angelica. The monks slept under massive images of the betrayal, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ painted with softness by a genius. Did these images shape the way they dealt with their own inner tensions. In the last cell on the left-hand side of the hallway the fresco depicts the two thieves and Jesus on the cross. You can see words in Latin speaking in backward text across the painting between Christ and the thief who recognizes who he is, who Christ is, and who asks to be remembered. The face of this thief is full of peace as he receives the promise of the backward text. On the other side, the face of the other thief utters hate, the hate seems to be eating him from the inside out: heart ache. We are all thieves on crosses and tourists in line to see the great cathedrals, looking for the answer to the questions of a thousand children handed through the grate in desperation, hope and love.
