Quietly nestled North and East of the city center of Florence, beyond the once grand Piazza della Libertà, across the railroad tracks, at the very boundary of the city, just before via Giovanni Boccaccio climbs and twists up the hill to the grand palazzi of Fiesole, lays Le Cure.
Le Cure, named for the women known as Le Cureandie who once washed clothes along the Mugnone which bisects the neighborhood, remains unassuming and largely unattractive to tourists.
And it was precisely for this reason that I would live there, well that and because it’s where B lived. In an apartment whose other units housed her mother, her half-brother, and a cousin. But in this neighborhood I would remain after all of that fell apart, moving to the other side of the Mugnone. Which is to say three blocks away.
Though Italians don’t have the same relationship to “blocks,” as a term for navigating and describing relative positions, as Americans do. This is easy enough to understand by just looking at a map of most Italian cities and trying to puzzle out the streets, or, for the naively confident, attempting to brave them behind the wheel. Most directions are given relative to piazzas, and knowing your local piazzas is like knowing your freeways in LA or your bridges and subway lines in New York (too many times I’ve nodded as a local animatedly pointed me around via landmarks I should have known, thanked them profusely, and then discretely consulted the map on my phone, which didn’t judge).
Le Cure’s piazza is a semi-circle at the base of the neighborhood, and it’s your first sight of this borgo as you emerge from the pedestrian tunnel passing under the railroad tracks or else, by car, loop back around and down the crazy squiggle the overpass takes. Your traditional Italian park-where-you-dare layout in the center, where locals know to leave room enough for the produce and clothes stalls erected each morning. Fronted by bars (a broader term in Italy), bakeries, a stationer, enoteca, and sundry. Three roads radiate out from this piazza at a hundred-and-twenty degrees or so of arc, up the hill, where residents live in three- and four-story green-shuttered Tuscan apartments.
Here and there a pizzaria, a bakery, a pasticceria, restaurant. Any one of which, if it hopes to survive, has vocal— strident supporters among the local populace.
I’m a fan of Casa della Pizza, where you can get a wood-fired pie for four or five Euros.
Or, across the Mugnone, and don’t tell them I told you, open only for lunch, Boutique della Pasta Fresca. Whose charmless storefront and interior is more than compensated for by the proprietor’s wit – somehow between gentle and Florentine stroppy – and meals of fresh pasta for well under ten Euros.
It, like most else in Le Cure, is populated by the people who live there, who work in the noisy, bustling city center, and return home to the quiettude of their village within the city, to share a meal. Like those at B’s mom’s in the apartment below her own (Her mom owns half the building. The other half is owned by her ex, who still lives there). Dining unpretentiously, easily, if elegantly in an oh-so Italian way: greeted with a glass of wine, chatting in the cozy kitchen/ dining area, nibbling on crostini when you find yourself already seated at the table lit with candles and covered in plates of bread and fruit and nuts and cheese. Someone’s passing you a broad bowl of farro with mixed veggies, and you’re pouring your host another glass of wine from the bottle on the table, the one with no label as it’s refilled at the enoteca down the street, as you try to explain police body cameras and the electoral college, and the faces around you, all relations of one another, smile with warmth, if perhaps not quite understanding.