Laetitia’s group crossed the Arno and walked up the many steps to Piazzale Michelangelo where they had panoramic views of the city.  As the group headed back toward the Ponte alla Carraia to cross the Arno again and return a hotel they passed a house with grotesque graffiti.  Over the years the terms “grotesque” and “graffiti’ have evolved new meanings very different from what they meant originally.  The term “grotesque” arose during the fifteenth century when Renaissance artists explored Nero’s former palace, then buried and overgrown with rooms that resembled underground grottoes or caves.  They began to produce works inspired by these fanciful forms of humans and animals that decorated the palace walls and this style of art became known as “grotesque.”  Later the word’s meaning evolved to “comically distorted.”  In Italy, a graffito was a drawing or inscription on an outside wall or other public surface intended as decoration.  The term was not originally associated with vandalism as it is today.

When Laetitia mentioned to her group that they were going to see graffiti, one man looked aghast apparently afraid that his wife would be exposed to crude sexually explicit drawings.  Laetitia stifled a smirk, suppressed making a sarcastic comment like “We’re all adults here,” and explained that in the original Italian sense of the word, graffiti was simply decorative art.  The exchange was the source of the limerick of the day.

When you’re thinking you’ll make an entreaty
Against going to look at graffiti
Don’t expect genitalia
Here in old Italia
Where it’s art, enjoy it with your sweetie.

Laetitia took her group to Museo Bargello.  Originally the Bargello was a public building housing the Capitano del Populo, “Captain of the People,” an office intended to counterbalance the power of the nobility.  In the museum collection are Michelangelo’s Bachus and Donatello’s David, in both marble and bronze.

When Laetitia went to the hotel bar late that afternoon, she learned from Felicia that she had been to Scandicci and had visited Villa L’Arcipresso.  Felicia told her that during the tour of the villa she learned that in 1928, D. H. Lawrence had arranged for the first edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover to be printed privately in Florence with the assistance of Florentine publisher, Pino Orioli.  Italian workers who spoke no English typeset the original edition by hand.  This resulted in lots of errors and, because of its explicit sexual content, the book could only be sold under the counter.  Nonetheless, sales were brisk and the income helped Lawrence pay the medical bills associated with his declining health.  While on her afternoon excursion, Felicia had picked up an English translation of Dante’s Inferno to read in the evenings while she was on the tour.  Lawrence and his publisher were the subjects of the day’s limerick.

Past authors who penned “areolae”
Might need a Pino Orioli
Just like D. H. Lawrence
Who published in Florence
Thwarting Brits who viewed sex as unholy.