Following in Lucy's footsteps

Henrietta Bredin on how today's Grand Tourists try to penetrate the real heart of a city

Miss Lavish darted under the archway of the white bullocks, and she stopped, and she cried: 'A smell! A true Florentine smell! Every city, let me teach you, has its own smell.—Is it a very nice smell?' said Lucy, who had inherited from her mother a distaste to dirt. One doesn't come to Italy for niceness,' was the retort; 'one comes for life.'

E.M. Forster, A Room With a View

Is it niceness or life that people have pursued so avidly from the days of the Grand Tour to the days of the gap year and, increasingly now, the grey gap years? Probably both, in the muddled sort of way that characterises the English's continuing devotion to Italy. Florence does of course do its level best to put people off, with its narrow streets smeared with dog dirt, its rebarbatively towering façades and its massively heavy, invariably locked doors. But this only tends to make visitors more determined to penetrate the secret heart of the place. Forster knew all about the feeling of exclusion that Florence evokes, the sense that the real life of the city is carrying on somewhere just out of reach. It is the feeling that drives tourists to unreasonable lengths to disguise their outsider status, refusing to carry maps or to consult their guide books in the street, ever in eager pursuit of the little trattoria round the corner where the locals eat or the faded fresco in the tiny church which is only open every other Wednesday between the hours of 3 and 5 and even then is impossible to see unless you know to give the sacristan a small donation accompanied by a polite request to turn on the lights.

Especially in places that, like Florence, are known above all for their overwhelming accumulation of art treasures, one tried and trusted way of feeling more of an insider is by really getting to know and appreciate those treasures, and their role in the shaping and building of the city's history.

Although today's Grand Tourists do not commission and acquire paintings and antiquities on the scale of their predecessors, they are keen to acquire knowledge. Putting aside the streak of selfishness that makes one want to have beautiful places to oneself, unsullied by the presence of other (one can't help feeling less worthy) visitors, for both young and old, getting the

art habit is surely something to be encouraged and nurtured. With the increasing popularity of public talks and lectures, it is only natural that this impulse should extend to self-improvement while on holiday. For those just embarking on adult life, it's more a case of taking advantage of that wonderful time when every new experience is a potential thrill and the course of one's life could change at any moment.

How thrilling for an 18-year-old boy to find himself gazing for the first time with a combination of wonder and lust at Bernini's bravura carving of Hades' greedy fingers making marshmallow imprints in the yielding softness of Persephone's thigh. What an astonishing privilege, fresh out of school, to be let loose in Venice during the cold, comparatively empty weeks of January and February and to feel that you have been given the keys to a private kingdom.

There are enlightened people out there, offering knowledge and illumination for lucky visitors, in towns and cities all over Italy. Those at the pre-university stage might choose John Hall's marvellous course, based in Venice, where as well as brilliant lectures on painting, architecture and sculpture by an impressive range of specialists and art historians, you might also be fortunate enough to have your ears opened to the shimmering intricacies of Vivaldi's music by Peter Phillips. And in the city where Verdi's La traviata and Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw were first performed, Rodney Milnes or Jeremy Sams might convert you to the addictively visceral appeal of opera.

In Florence, all ages are catered for by the venerable and mildly eccentric British Institute. Its laudable aim is to act as a point of cultural exchange between Britain and Italy and, with that in mind, it offers language classes (in both Italian and English), courses of lectures designed to give a general introduction to culture and art in Florence or shorter sets of more specialised talks on, for example, 'Women in Renaissance Florence', 'Small Museums' or 'Leonardo and Michelangelo'.

This really is what Forster's Reverend Eager meant when he talked about 'the real Florence' and the people who knew how to find it, 'who never walked about with Baedekers, who had learned to take a siesta after lunch, who took drives the pension tourists had never heard of, and saw by private influence galleries which were closed' to others.

A visit to Florence in the week before Easter can be given an entirely new emphasis by signing up, for example, for a three-day programme of alternating lectures and conducted tours, specially timed to coincide with the Lenten period, on Last Suppers. Many convents and monasteries have Last Supper frescoes in their refectories and few of them are accessible to the general public. Thanks to the persuasive powers of the British Institute you will be able to join a small group of people, led by an expert guide, to look at Franciabigio's 'Last Supper' in the Convent° della Calza, Perugino's in the Convent° di St Onofrio or Taddeo Gaddi's at Santa Croce.

While Florentine children as young as five and six can be seen trotting into the Institute's language centre on Piazza Strozzi, their parents might care to indulge in the distraction of this year's April to June series of Audrey Hepburn films; giggling English 18-year-old girls could find themselves beginning to appreciate Italian food that doesn't come in flat white boxes from the back of delivery bikes by trying a two-week cooking course; their aunts and uncles might find their interest aroused by a lecture on Dante or Franco Marucci's

work in progress, a five-volume history of English literature; while their grandparents might enjoy 'Villas and Gardens', a week of talks and visits.

As a respite from all this activity, anyone attending a course can use the facilities of the Institute's Harold Acton Library in the imposing Palazzo Lanfredini. There's a fine collection of books, free Internet access as part of the membership and a splendid room to sit in, overlooking the Arno, while making your choice from the intriguing range of newspapers and periodicals the Library subscribes to, from the Financial Times, Sight and Sound and the William Morris Society Newsletter to Repubblica, the Literary Review and, naturally, The Spectator.

So does all of this bring one any closer to Miss Lavish's idea of life? I think it does. Learning about a country's art, literature, history, music and food can only increase understanding of that country and the people who live there. Learning the language helps still more of course. You're much more likely to feel part of a place if you can eavesdrop on the people drinking coffee at the next table or understand a fraction more than the instruction sempre diritto when asking for directions to the station. But there's nothing like that small secret kick of excitement you get when you find yourself in a church which seems at first glance to have little to offer but which you happen to know conceals, in a far corner, a Bellini altarpiece just waiting for you to drop 50 cents in the box so that the lights will come on and reveal it in all its contemplative glory and ravishing, saturated colour.