Christmas with your relatives, Easter with whomever you wish,” say the Italians. For Florentines, in particular, it would be unthinkable to spend Natale anywhere but in the bosom of their family. And where better? As Florence is a city best appreciated in winter. Toward the end of October, the humidity dissipates, daylight saving time is over, and all those little underground restaurants and wine bars—the buchi, or “holes,” for which Florence is justly famous—are transformed from claustrophobic panic rooms into snug retreats from the chill and wet.
The city reaches its apotheosis at the holiday, when the main thoroughfares are strung with tiny colored lights, trees have sprung up in many piazzas, green and red garlands loop across the shops of the Ponte Vecchio, and the aroma of chestnuts roasting on street-corner braziers fills the air. Presepi, or “crèches,” mushroom in the crypts of many of the city’s churches, including the lovely 13th-century Basilica di Santa Croce. These can be quite elaborate, akin to the miniature worlds through which model trains journey to nowhere. Especially engaging are the presepi viventi, or “living crèches”—the Virgin Mary, Joseph, the wise men, and the infant Christ portrayed in motionless solemnity by neighborhood children. The stillness lasts until a child coughs, and the spell is broken.
Glamour and display are essential components of Christmas in Florence, and at around five o’clock, as the sun sets, streetlights shed a warm glow on the fancy designer boutiques on the Via de’ Tornabuoni. At the bar of Caffè Rivoire, on the Piazza della Signoria, where summer’s outdoor tables have long since been hauled off, the city’s stylish young people drink, or rather spoon, cups of dark, bittersweet hot chocolate. And at cafés such as Paszkowski, on the Piazza della Repubblica, young men in sleek Armani suits and gold wrist chains languorously sip black espressos and talk into their cellphones while elegant older women in tailored wool suits and competing perfumes chat at the small tables.
Soldiers in full regalia— bersaglieri with feathers in their hats—and sword-wielding members of the carabinieri stride about the piazza as though on official business. In reality they are on their break, and when young foreign girls ask to be photographed with them, they pretend annoyance but, in the end, comply with the hauteur befitting their status. Some are accompanied by their perfectly groomed, equally haughty mounts. But for me the beast that best embodies Florence at Christmas is no thoroughbred. Rather, it is the scrappy pony that, decked out in a sort of Santa Claus outfit complete with bells, faded tinsel, and tattered red and white fake fur, sometimes holds court outside the Rinascente department store. It is led by an ill-tempered fellow who extorts funds from parents who want snapshots of their beautifully turned-out children alongside or on top of the hapless creature, which, despite everything, maintains a threadbare dignity.
Holiday celebrations in Italy run almost a full month, from December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, to Epiphany, on January 6. And this is the season when Florence shows off its true culinary glories, its winter dishes—delicious vegetable soups thickened with unsalted bread, beans flavored with rosemary and simmered in a glass flask, fresh pappardelle sauced with wild boar—foods that in summer seem as inconceivable as wool coats. On Christmas Eve, two days of nonstop eating kick off with a meatless dinner that includes three or four primi piatti (perhaps seafood risotto, ravioli stuffed with lobster, and spaghetti with clams and mussels), followed by a fish—branzino or sea bass baked in salt. The menu for lunch on Christmas Day itself is more circumscribed, beginning with tortelli in brodo and culminating in the presentation of a gorgeous stuffed and roasted goose or capon.
Early in December, the city’s bakeries begin displaying irresistible dolci di Natale. Florence itself has no tradition of Christmas sweets, so what you see in the neighborhood pasticceria are in fact imports from other parts of Italy: soft marzipan ricciarelli and panforte (some so dense that not long ago one was used, it is said, as a murder weapon) from Siena, cantucci from Prato. There are also the ubiquitous raisin-flecked panettone, from Milan, and bell-shaped pan doro, from Verona, which despite their origins in the north are eaten all over Italy and, in the case of panettone, all over the world—an irony not lost on the Italians, many of whom, when pressed, will admit they don’t much like it. Nonetheless, at Christmas everyone consumes massive quantities of the stuff—sliced and toasted, slathered with winter berries and fresh whipped cream, or, most often, simply torn off in bite-size hunks.
Christmas is a much more formal affair in Florence than it is in America—think Dolce & Gabbana rather than flannel bathrobes, Perrier-Jouët not eggnog, marrons glacés instead of sugar cookies. What you eat, as much as what you give, signals prestige, sophistication, and, not least, money. One hears the word importante used in shops to describe certain items. Sheets are importante if they are Pratesi, an egg timer is importante if it is an Alessi, fish is importante if it is a whole sea bass baked in salt.
It’s a word that testifies to the good taste of Florence’s citizens as well as to their respect for quality craftsmanship. After all, fine leather and paper goods have been a staple of the local economy for centuries. Yet for all their priceless antiques, luxurious wall hangings, and tastefully spare coffee tables, Florentine homes are notoriously lacking in comfort, which may in part explain the popularity of the cozy Irish and English pubs that have cropped up in the city of late. In this Christmas season, marked by ritual and tradition, Sunday bests and neckties, they offer Florentines the chance to take a break from shopping and relax for an hour or so.
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