First Day In Florence, May 1995

I was walking along the Arno on a street lined with expensive shops and hotels when I glanced casually to my left down a short, narrow passage that wasn't even a street. There at the end were huge naked men, the marble statue reproductions in front of the Uffizi.
I was shocked.
It was the lunch hour and I was waiting for things to open up again to secure the rental car I had ordered, and the "opera' tickets for a little theater piece that turned out to have only one song, lots of artistic agonizing in Italian and an audience of Italians dressed to the nines. I remember one bella figura wearing matching turquoise leather dress and coat.
I also discoverd Santa Croce that day and returned to it again and again. Dante is buried there. But it was a painting of perhaps the Madonna or Magdelene, dressed in red with a blue mantle from which her unruly black hair seemed to billow before the turbulent winds in the hills that drew me, a spriritual experience that remains with me to this day.
She was wild with something. An untamed woman. Rapture probably.
In that spirit, as I hunt for her online, I give you Kelly Bersheim's Santa Croce. I don't think she would mind.