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At home the politicians conferred with the military. After the peace we restless soldiers were to be 'pacified' by increased local leave. In Rome I had the option of 'leave centres' at Aquino or Florence. My choice was immediate. I left on 28 June with Staff-Sergeant Gordon Milne, we being responsible for the safe delivery and return of a group of privates. Our little party reached Pisa at nightfall. We moved through a wilderness of t roofless houses - mere shells, blackened with smoke, deserted. But in the centre, far off, the Duomo, the Baptistery and the Leaning Tower stood white and undamaged, a marvel to our eyes.

Florence has been described so often. I describe her now because I saw her in a way none had seen her in the past and, please God, no-one will see her so again. This was a city of loveliness, soiled loveliness - all the Arno bridges destroyed apart from the Ponte Vecchio. Parts of the waterfront had been blown up. The Uffizi Gallery was empty. The Medici Chapel was a tomb without Michelangelo's sculptures. Many of the famous frescoes were entombed with sandbags and blast-walls. What remained for us? The buildings. Milne and I climbed Giotto's Tower, visited the Cathedral and the Baptistery (the great sculptured bronze doors had been removed) the Bargello, Santa Croce and Dante's supposed birthplace.

Renaissance? Yes, and more. Resurrection. The great re-birth was happening before our eyes! Never more so than in the way we saw Michelangelo's 'David’ - through a cloud of brick-dust. We saw the open doors of the Accademia dell Belle Arti. At the end of a long corridor stood two horses, champing within their nose-bags and harnessed to carts full of bricks and rubble. Rising behind them was the young David, potent image, with workmen removing the last rows of protective brick. When the first few courses had been lifted away and it was seen that this masterpiece was undamaged, the curator wept for joy.

So was set the scene for our discovery of Florence. We watched Benvenuto Cellini's 'Perseus' being lifted back upon his pedestal in the Lanzi Loggia, were among the first to see the coming to light of the Fra Angelico frescoes. Hammers and chisels at work everywhere.

It was eerie to walk about this town and, turning some corner, to be halted by a scene from a book seen long ago. And those small discoveries! A beautiful Della Robbia child's head above a porch; then sudden emerging, astonished, into the Signoria Piazza with that-so-often-photographed tower and loggia here in three-dimensional sunlit reality. Not stone alone, flesh too. Gordon and I sat on the edge of a dry fountain for an hour or two and let the atmosphere of the place sink into us through the defensive armour which five-and-a-half years of Army life builds upon the best-intentioned.

It was the time when siesta ends and people appear. 'Look,' said Gordon, 'over there - Botticelli's Primavera.' This was our first encounter with Florence's living Renaissance - girls and youths who might have stepped from a sixteenth-century canvas. This... in a town which had been almost a part of the front-line and which had suffered all the indignities of a slow German retreat.

Civilisation. Here, unlike Rome, which had suffered nothing, there were no shoeshine boys, no touts wanting to buy cigarettes or market their 'sisters'. There were few beggars. Each evening Milne and I sauntered along the banks of the Arno or sat upon the stone parapet to watch the people pass. A lovely time, the hills blue with approaching night and the reflections of old houses shivering in the water.

Renaissance continued when, after walking among the cypresses and statues in the Boboli Gardens we entered the thirteenth-century Church of the Carmine, hoping to see the famous Masaccio frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel. Hopes sank as we found the chapel closed by a hoarding. Workmen could be seen. Miraculously, the foreman asked if we would like to see the frescoes. We entered and there they were - newly emerged from shelter and with scaffolding reaching the roof. We climbed up and obtained a better, closer, view than will ever be achieved by latter-day tourists. These, among the first seemingly 'three-dimensional' paintings on a flat surface lost nothing by such close inspection. And the foreman did not cadge cigarettes from us.

One evening the whole city was revealed to us in a way some might call theatrical. I call it dramatic. We had strolled up the Viale Michelangelo, to the great Piazza which bears his name and from whence the picture-postcard panorama is on offer. But a thunderstorm threatened in the surrounding hills and, far away, we saw rain curtaining the outskirts of the city. Cumulus towered above us, pierced occasionally by a shaft of clear sunlight falling, caressing, a dome or roof with a golden touch. Unforgettable. Next day we made the long climb to Fiesole where Leonardo launched his 'great bird' and where the view, even more extensive, was as beautiful. The climb tired us and, finding a little wood, we removed our Army boots and socks to laze in the shade.

I think it was there, lying with half-closed eyes, that I began to put my experience of Italy into perspective. In Rome I had looked at the squalid people of the streets and wondered where were the men who had brought the city's great buildings into being, who had painted and sculpted amazing works of art. In St. Peter's I had seen statues of Popes, in the palaces and museums were images of the 'men of power' - politicians, bankers, merchants and the like. Rome was a stately marvel. Florence was a poet's dream. Then I remembered the faces of these 'famous' men. With few splendid exceptions they mirrored greed, cunning, meanness, self-indulgence and cruelty. Such men would have been gratefully forgotten - apart from historians - were it not for... the artists, sculptors and architects, many of whom had been born among the kind of street-people who had sparked my disgust and contempt.

In four months I would reach my 31st birthday. To have taken so long to reach so obvious a conclusion must surely betoken premature senility.

Descending, we collided with a noisy celebration - fireworks along the Arno, a street carnival, military bands, beautiful blonde Botticelli Venuses and Virgins in their best dresses... and thousands of bottles of American beer offered free to all comers. We had forgotten that the Americans make a fuss about the Fourth of July. For the first time I felt that peace might really have arrived. If poor Europe could achieve such a rebirth as here in Florence, we might dare to hope again. Some day, I wrote to Minna, 'you and I will come here and see everything... everything!'' But when I returned to Rome there was a letter from Minna awaiting me. It quelled my enthusiasm and left me doubting (See The First News from Denmark A----------).

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