Duomo
Trance Tales: Relics (Stories about places)
Standing on a wide cobblestone avenue crowded with people. It’s a busy afternoon in Florence. All sorts of merchants are peddling their wares from stalls. Color saturates the street: women wearing red skirts with white aprons covering the front, men in dark brown trousers and tops laced across the chest. Children in marigold pants, ocean blue tunics and burnt orange dresses twirl and duck beneath the grasping arms of their parents as they laugh.
But there is no sound and no movement. The figures conducting business, shopping, and inspecting goods are all 2D forms lifted from a painting and set against the 3D background of the avenue. Their faces are perpetually frozen in grins, frowns and solemn stares. A man to my right has a large basket woven out of reeds that holds a litter of kittens. They climb over one another in a mass of fur, tiny faces and paws peeking over the edge and through the gaps in the weave. They too are motionless and fixed in time.
On my other side, a little further down, a stall displays a neat row of plucked fowl hanging by the necks. You walk down the center of the avenue towards the enormous red dome of the cathedral towering towards the pale blue sky. Just outside the entrance, more stalls sell Catholic medals and minuscule parchment scrolls with prayers inked carefully on them in Latin. The tall wooden doors of the building are thrown wide open, welcoming all who approach. You go inside and are instantly enveloped in gloom. The overpowering scent of incense and candles surrounds you. Large tables full of glass candles are set against the walls to the left and right.
You venture deeper and emerge into the main section of the cathedral. The ceiling soars above your head. Small windows set high in the walls emit rays of sunlight that shoot over the dim, polished floor far below. Low wooden pews holding a silent, painted congregation fill the center of the space. You touch the smooth cool back of a pew and feel the hard surface beneath your fingers. The landscape subtly shifts before your eyes. The patterned mosaic of the central floor is now visible, the long rows of pews gone.
Tourists wearing modern clothes wander about with their necks craned backwards as they survey the ceiling in awe. A group of nuns dressed completely in white shepherd a gaggle of uniformed schoolchildren across the center of the floor. You lean against a wall and let your gaze travel up to a solitary window. A single white pigeon roosts on the sill, its feathers glowing in the soft illumination of the sun…
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Are there any places, mysteries, deities or fae folk you’d like to see a meditation on?
Let me know!