We had seen too much of Florence in summer: the hordes of tourists, the brutal heat, the general irritation brought on by jostling and discomfort. Even in spring these days, the city can be grossly overcrowded and too hot. My wife, Elizabeth, and I looked at each other one rainy winter day at home in San Francisco, struck by the same thought: Let’s go now! February, after all, is when Florentine food is at its best, and so is the city.
Florence in winter belongs to the Florentines. There’s a coziness in the bars and restaurants, a conviviality, a revival of the city’s native stylishness and grace that, in the hot season, is masked by the flip-flopped, fanny-packed, T-shirted invaders, who unfailingly bring to mind Noël Coward’s immortal lyric “Why do the wrong people travel when the right people stay at home?”
In response, at the height of tourist season, many Florentines either keep to their abodes or head for the hills. In winter, however, the city returns to itself. Locals take the time to talk to you. Strangers will walk you to your destination. And it’s rarely very cold.
Our winter days began and ended in the elegant white and glass-walled lobby of the Hotel Lungarno (double rooms from $497; 14 Borgo San Jacopo; 011-39-055-27-261; lungarnohotels.com), owned by the famous shoemaking Ferragamo family and one of the only hotels in Florence directly on the Arno, not separated from it even by a walkway. Since the devastating flood of 1966, the river has regained its health and its civility: snowy egrets stalk the marshy banks looking for fish and frogs; terns wheel overhead; and in the dimming dusk, hard-muscled young Florentines row racing shells, the slim boats’ images mirrored in the water.
Some mornings we would step into a weak, damp breeze threatening rain, the air gray, a world of bone-cold shadows. Then the next day, the sun, though late to rise and early to set, would flood the streets with sharp-edged light, and the city of tan, beige and dun walls would turn gold. As we walked the stone floors of the churches and museums, our footsteps echoing in this unpeopled season, the bold colors of Domenico Ghirlandaio and Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi seemed to radiate an almost bodily warmth — and we never had to crane a neck or have a foot stepped on to linger in contemplation of the inexhaustible beauty.
Florence always has an air of studious austerity, never more so than in winter. Everything shrinks, including the array of food available. It’s a time of beans, sausage, kale, soup, meat grilled over wood fires. We sought out the restaurants that seemed to us the most purely Florentine, where serious connoisseurs of the city’s ancient foodways have found the rich, simple, deep-flavored cuisine little changed through the generations. We had lots of good advice: from friends in the old nobility, from longtime expatriates, from food-loving art historians, even from the occasional concierge reluctant to send Americans to the sort of place the Florentines prefer to keep to themselves.
“Perhaps you would not like it. It is very plain.”
Trattoria Toscana Gozzi Sergio (8r Piazza San Lorenzo; 011-39-055-281-941), better known as Da Sergio, is a prime example. Utterly unembellished, with high ceilings and little in the way of decor, the restaurant serves the classic Tuscan cooking that I like to call “a thing on a plate.” A pair of gooey cannelloni, still bubbling from the oven, occupied the center of a white dish, without so much as a parsley sprig adorning their nakedness. The fettunta was nothing more than grilled bread topped with crushed beans, near-black Tuscan kale and a dousing of peppery green olive oil. The bollito misto wasn’t very mixed — ours consisted entirely of beef brisket and tongue — but with the addition of the garlicky, anchovy-thick green sauce, it was unctuous, wintry and just right. As almost anywhere in Florence, you can spend big money on a Brunello di Montalcino or a Super Tuscan, but what you see at Da Sergio and on every other table in town is a carafe or a fiasco (the old-fashioned straw-covered bottle) of red wine, perhaps not the most sought-after Chianti but assuredly local and made from Sangiovese grapes.
