Rod McQueen - Fantasy in Florence

A friend is taking his family to Florence this month. When he asked what they should see, Sandy and I told him about the many obvious sights: Ponte Vecchio, Michelangelo’s David at Accademia, Renaissance art at the Uffizi (be sure to book advance tickets to save yourself a two-hour wait on line), the Duomo and the Baptistery, and the Central Market.
But we also made our top ten suggestions. Here they are for all to enjoy:
1. Gilli, a restaurant in Piazza Della Repubblica. At mid-morning, order an espresso or caffe latte and choose a pastry. Our favorite was the bombolone. At lunch, eat outside. Have the niçoise salad. Listen to the musicians nearby. (We lived just two blocks away at Via Roma 3.)
2. Museo dell’Opera del Duomo. Everybody wants to see the Duomo but inside the cathedral is mostly just a big empty space, unless you feel up to climbing all 463 steps to the top. (Brunelleschi’s bones are on the lower level.) All the good art is in the Museo dell’Opera which is behind the Duomo. See the bronze doors from the Baptistery (the ones outside are reproductions) as well as Michelangelo’s Pieta and Donatello’s haunting Mary Magdalene carved out of wood.
3. Gregorian chants at 5 p.m. by the Benedictine monks at San Miniato del Monte. Take a taxi for the 15-minute ride to the church south of Florence; have bus tickets for the ride back to town via city bus #12 that passes in front of the church. Wonderful cemetery out back. Great views of Florence from the church and from Piazzale Michelangelo part way down the hill. Bus tickets cost about a euro each and are available at any tabachi (tobacconist). Stick your ticket in the slot when you board for a time stamp. Hang onto the tickets during the ride in case you are asked.
4. Verrazano on Via Dei Tavolini for lunch or pastries. Across the street, Perchè Non? (Why not?) for the best gelato in Florence.
5. Celestino, a great restaurant in the Piazza Santa Felicita, just south of Ponte Vecchio. Take a look at the Pontormo, just to the right inside of the door of the church, for modern colors and shapes in this unusual Deposition scene.
6. The Boboli Gardens behind the Pitti Palace. A long walk on a hot day up to the top but a rewarding trip for views and the gallery of ceramics.
7. If you’re in Florence on the last Sunday of the month, there’s an antique market on the streets around the Piazza dei Ciompi, half a dozen blocks east of the Duomo. Everything from chandeliers to Nazi memorabilia. At the north end of the market, on Via Petrapiana, is a pastry shop, Nencioni, where you want to buy fedora, the best pastry we’ve ever tasted in any country (rum-soaked cake and whipped cream encased in dark chocolate curls).
8. Take the #7 city bus from Piazza San Marco, a ten-minute walk north on Via Cavour from the Duomo. It’s a half-hour trip up the hill to Fiesole, a small village with views of Florence as well as a Roman amphitheatre and Etruscan ruins. If money’s no object, have dinner at Villa San Michele, the best dining in Florence.
9. Piazza della Santissima Annunziata for architecture including Spedale degli Innocenti, the first orphanage in Europe. Piazza Santo Spirito, south of the Arno, for city life. Walk west along Via di Santo Spirito for artisans, wine shops and restaurants.
10. The Bargello, on Via Della Proconsolo, Italy’s first national museum. Michelangelo on the main floor, Donatello’s David on the second floor. Magnifico!

Met an old friend walking on King Street in downtown Toronto yesterday. Let’s call him Chicken Little; he believes the sky is falling. Not because of the global financial crisis, but because Canada is suffering from lethargy and a lack of innovation from which we’ll never recover.
Chicken Little recited a litany of tales he’d recently learned. An executive at an international company told him they can get people to move to Hamburg or Boston but not Toronto because there’s nothing worthwhile here. Someone else who began their career at a Canadian bank when that institution was five times bigger than Banco Santander pointed out that Santander is now five times bigger than the Canadian bank. Another individual complained that our federal civil service, once a storied and distinguished group, no longer punches above its weight. As for Canada’s vaunted peacekeeping role, Panama has more soldiers wearing the UN blue berets than Canada.
There were other stories, but I got worn down from listening. When he finally stopped to take a breath, I told him I was working on a book about Research in Motion and the BlackBerry, a successful Canadian company with a high profile global brand if there ever was one. Ten years ago, RIM had two hundred employees, now they have more than 8,000.
CL was not impressed, claiming that RIM couldn’t even hire the top graduates from the University of Waterloo, right on their doorstep; they were all being wooed away by Microsoft in Redmond, Washington. And why hadn’t RIM caused to be created a Canadian Silicon Valley filled with dozens of other success stories as did the launch of Hewlett-Packard?
I reflected on the morning I’d just spent at the Million Dollar Round Table, attended by 7,600 of the top life insurance agents from around the world. The upbeat presentations at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre were about courage and persistence, motivation and mettle, how life insurance could change lives and offer career success.
While no one likes life insurance agents because they remind us of our own mortality, I’d rather spend a morning with them than five minutes on a street with the likes of Chicken Little. I did not play the role of Henny Penny. I did not join Chicken Little to go and warn the king that the future of Canada is all behind us.

I stopped recently at Museum station on the Toronto subway to inspect the finished product of so many months of renovation. In celebration of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), the platform between northbound and southbound trains has been tricked up with stately columns as well as reproductions of three items from the ROM collection: a totem pole, an Egyptian coffin and something else I cannot identify.
As you sail by on the train, they look fine, but up close they’re cheesy. As Dolly Parton would say, “It takes a lot of money to look this cheap.”
My disappointment matches my dismal view of the ROM’s new Crystal, based on a drawing on a napkin by Daniel Libeskind. The addition looks interesting from the outside, but go inside and it’s impossible to get any sense of spatial perspective. The interior is a series of nooks and crannies with surfaces at so many crazy angles that installation of exhibits is well nigh impossible.
I’ll reserve judgment on the changes by Frank Gehry under way at the Art Gallery of Ontario, but so far it looks like a mall makeover.
I’m a fan of Gehry. We’ve been fortunate to be able to visit Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao where the interior is just as exciting as the exterior and provides breathtaking space for Richard Serra and other artists. We’ve also seen the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. The design is so compelling we spent an entire morning just walking around and around the outside.
By far the best of Toronto’s recent architectural eruptions is Jack Diamond’s Four Seasons Centre, home to ballet and opera. Viewed at night, from across University Avenue, it’s a magnificent orchestration of glass, metal, wood and light.
As for the Crystal or the AGO, I wouldn’t go around the corner to take a glance. If anyone’s expecting “cultural tourism” to boost the number of visitors to Toronto, the ROM and the AGO aren’t going to do it. If only Ken Thomson had hired Gehry to design a new gallery on the eastern waterfront. Gehry would have had sufficient space to do something terrific, not just for Thomson’s collection, but also for that part of the city that looks like Dresden after the Allied bombing.

My journalism career began in the 1960s when I wrote a high school news column at John F. Ross Collegiate for the Guelph Mercury. I’d sit down at my Smith-Corona typewriter every Sunday night at 9 p.m. (my deadline was Monday morning) and write until I fell asleep.
I was paid nine cents a column inch. On a good week, I could earn $4, enough to take my then girlfriend, now wife, to the movies and then for cherry Cokes and chips with gravy.
The memories came flooding back as I read Denise Rudnicki’s excellent study on the uses of anonymous sources in the Globe and Mail. The first time I ever cited an anonymous source was when I quoted an unnamed friend in one of my columns as saying: “Don’t let schoolwork interfere with your extracurricular activities.”
The morning after publication I was summoned to the office of the principal, Lorne Fox. Fox reamed me out in front of a squirming pair of other students, the president of the student council and the president of the athletic council. Fox said the entire school had been held up to ridicule, teachers’ work had been debased and I was nothing but a ne’er-do-well.
Unlike some situations where finding the name of the anonymous source becomes the focus of everyone’s fury, Fox didn’t care. What mattered to him was the poor impression readers would have of the school. As far as he was concerned, everybody should be punished. The school prom, to be held within days, would be canceled.
In the end, Fox relented. The dance was not cancelled. But he assigned a teacher to read my columns before submission. There was no need. I had learned my lesson. In writing thousands of stories and a dozen books since, I don’t think I’ve cited an anonymous source more than a handful of times.
Nor should anyone else. If someone won’t talk on the record, their comments don’t deserve to be heard. Newspapers as grand as the New York Times have found greasy ways around such a simple rule by allowing writers to quote someone with the slimmest of explanations such as “who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not allowed to speak on behalf of the candidate.”
Such subterfuge should not be allowed. A reader’s trust is too precious to lose.

Is anybody else getting tired of apologies? Residential school students, Chinese immigrants who paid head tax, Vimy Ridge vets offended by some museum label, every time you turn around the federal government is saying sorry for someone else’s sins.
Lately, the members of the Harper government have been on their knees so much it gives new meaning to the old adage about the Church of England being the Tory party at prayer.
Of course, saying sorry on behalf of someone else’s transgressions is always easy. Bill Clinton apologized for slavery; Tony Blair for the Irish potato famine.
If only I could figure out a way of going after the MacDonalds of Sleat or the McLeods of Dunvegan who drove the McQueens off the Isle of Skye in 1739 maybe there would be apologies, even reparations, in the form of peat for the fireplace or some other useful commodity in this era of rising energy prices.
Any suitably sorrowful takers?

We’ve just returned from four days in North Carolina and I can report that the recession has the Northeast in its grip. The only thing that was unchanged, year over year, was the weather. While Toronto suffered in a gloomy 18C, the Outer Banks were a sunny, sultry 33C.
In historic Beaufort, North Carolina, the twelfth town settled in the United States, half of the white clapboard homes on the prime eight-block stretch of Front Street facing the water are for sale. A shop owner told us that a recession always arrives there a year earlier than everywhere else and lasts a year longer. He pegged the beginning of this downturn as occurring a year ago with no end in sight.
Restaurants that have not changed menus and moved to bistro prices are struggling to even be half full. The only places doing well are the likes of Wilber’s, home of the best barbecue in the state. The establishment, opened in 1962, is still going strong in two locations in Goldsboro. Of course, two can eat bellyful combo plates of chicken, pulled pork, potato salad and cole slaw accompanied by constant refills of sweet iced tea for under $20.
You could shoot a cannon from Fort Macon through Nordstrom outside Raleigh. Toronto’s Pearson Airport was all but empty coming and going. Hang on to your hats, it’s going to be a long and bumpy ride.

In a week of bad to so-so news from the banks, one story stands out. Ed Clark, CEO of TD Bank, today announced he will exercise some $20 million in options, keep 15 per cent for himself in bank shares, give away $8 million to charity and use the rest of the money to pay for the cost of the options as well as taxes owing.
Of all the definitions of leadership that I’ve ever heard, this ranks with the best.
Clark started his working life as the most reviled bureaucrat ever to offend business. As a public servant in the Trudeau government, he was blamed for being the author of the 1980 National Energy Program.
For us nationalists, the NEP’s goals seemed eminently sensible: energy security, redistribution of wealth and more Canadian ownership of the oil and gas sector. Business leaders and Alberta fought over who hated him the most. Clark won the Outstanding Civil Servant Award.
Next stop in Clark’s unusual career path was Merrill Lynch, followed by president and CEO of Canada Trust. TD Bank bought Canada Trust, Clark in tow, and he was soon running the bank.
When TD and CIBC proposed a merger in 1998, the published list of officers-to-be had Clark in the top role. For CIBC it wasn’t so much of a merger as a succession strategy. Only Matt Barrett, among recent Canadian Big Five CEOs, has run two banks. Clark almost became the second to cross that chasm.
And now this. Red Ed, his foes called him in the NEP days. In their minds he was a socialist. Well, it turns out they were right. Ed Clark has found a new way to redistribute wealth.
May others follow his lead.

We’ve been back from Florence for a while, but when people ask about our time there, we no longer talk about what we saw or who we met, we’re more likely to describe how the experience changed us.
Sandy discovered that her creativity knows no bounds, that she has her own unique artistic voice, and can create beauty from wire, paints, plaster of Paris, charcoal, screening, beads, bottle bottoms – anything she chooses. For my part, I learned that I can easily live without the public profile of my picture on a newspaper column or my byline on some magazine article that the world will little note nor long remember.
We learned the importance of keeping family close, honoring the work of others, and constantly being curious about the world around. We learned not to envy anyone, to cultivate friendships, and to spend time each day on tasks that have intrinsic value. We learned to treasure the Italian way of life that marvels in the moment, celebrates youth and age alike, and treats strangers generously and with respect. We learned that taking risks in life can offer great rewards.
But most of all, we learned that while we do not require as much as we previously believed by way of living space or material possessions, we do need each other. On our anniversary, we two high school sweethearts bought a small brass padlock, wrote our initials and the date on it with a black marker, and secured the lock with the dozens of other similar sentimental statements on the wrought iron railing beneath the statue of goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini on Ponte Vecchio, the oldest bridge across the Arno, the one lined with modern-day jewelers and goldsmith shops. The tradition is relatively recent. Couples have been declaring their love for each other in this manner and at this location for about ten years. Once the lock was in place, we threw the keys into the Arno. Until death us do part.

Florence is a city that celebrates all the seasons. In May, the weather moves immediately from the high spring of April to high summer. Daytime temperatures soar to 27C and stay there.
Right now, on the gently sloping hill around Piazza Michelangelo, with its spectacular views of the city, there is a glorious iris show. The annual event, first held in 1957, showcases thousands of specimen plants. Stone pathways lead past mounded beds exploding with the familiar blue, white, purple, and yellow blooms in various combinations but there’s also black and chocolate and a triple iris that’s as big as the late Queen Mum’s hat.
The prize-winners from other years have lyrical names – Honky Tonk Blues, Kilt Tilt, Babbling Brook, Spun Gold, Sable Night, Shipshape, Dream Lover, Before the Storm, Silverado, Pink Taffeta – from an alphabet of countries, Australia to the United States.
But there aren’t just iris. There’s also redbud and roses, a pond of pink water lilies, unusual orange poppies, bridal wreath, deutzia, columbine, wispy French tamarisk, and white rock cress so thick and prolific it almost forms a hedge. This is a garden that appeals to many senses: the sight of the colors, the smell of their perfume, the sound of trilling blackbirds, and the touch of warm sun and a light breeze on the skin.
Other smaller sites also offer their beauty. In the city, wisteria falls over walls and in the walled garden at the Palazzo del Vivarelli Colonna, there are lemons in abundance, purple and yellow pansies as well as azalea bushes in pink, red, and orange.
We enjoyed our stay in Florence and we’re happy to be home, close to family in Canada. But at times like these, when overnight temperatures fall to 4C and frost threatens our Toronto garden, you pine for Florence and its carefree climate.

It was Dan Quisenberry who famously said, “I have seen the future. It looks like the past, only longer.” I hate to quarrel with the ace relief pitcher for the Kansas City Royals, whose submarine-style delivery dominated the 1980s, but the future is getting shorter all the time.
Fifteen years ago, when I was working with Don Tapscott on the best-seller The Digital Economy, Don said the most important message in the book was for people to get on the Internet. Now, the web is ubiquitous.
Ten years ago, Research in Motion – the subject of my next book – went public. The Waterloo-based maker of the BlackBerry had 198 employees. Now, RIM has 8,400 employees, 5,800 of whom work in Waterloo. The company’s market cap is $80 billion, making it Canada’s biggest company.
Five years ago I signed up for my first Google Alert, which today brought me the news that my book about Edgar Bronfman Jr., The Icarus Factor, had been mentioned in yesterday’s issue (or was it tomorrow’s?) of The Nation, published in Bangkok, Thailand. I didn’t have to do a thing, the information just showed up.
Quiz was wrong. Another sports figure, Washington Redskins coach George Allen, had it right when he said, “The future is now.”
There is no longer any today, just a smatter of nostalgia and whatever happens next.