Your friend in Florence
Five hundred years ago the richest families in Florence won the right to sell their own wine, so they cut little hatches into their palace walls. Walking to a shop was apparently beneath them.
You knocked. A hand appeared. Wine came out. Nobody made small talk. Honestly, centuries ahead of its time.
Then the plague arrived and these became the safest bar in Europe. Wine out through the stone, coins into a dish of vinegar, contact with nobody. Florence did not miss a single evening.
Then the centuries bricked them shut. The best idea this city ever had spent four hundred years hiding behind a postbox.
About a hundred and fifty are still in these walls. You have probably walked past six of them today without looking up.
A few have opened again. We know which ones, what time they open, and which one pours the Chianti worth crossing the river for.
That is the afternoon. Four windows, two hours, a glass in your hand and no coach party anywhere near you. Twenty euro.
Then the light goes, the shutters roll up, and the whole city changes shift.
Same guide, different liquid. We meet at the old bridge, deal a card game until nobody is a stranger, and go drink where the people who live here drink.
Somebody always swears they cannot sing. Somebody always ends up holding the microphone with both hands. It is reliably the same person.
Windows, twenty. The night, twenty. Both, thirty — roughly two spritzes in the wrong piazza, except you get Florence and a group chat out of it.
