It’s windy the day I start language school and in the downstairs atrium the doorman is distraught. He says it’s never windy like this, not in spring, not in Florence. He points to my hair which I know, from long experience, will be blow-dried into a stiff bouffant. He makes a dismayed gesture. It says: look what the world is coming to. Upstairs, the British Institute stretches across the piano nobile in a state of picturesque torpor. It’s just after nine in the morning and I’m the only student here. Expecting a small classroom, I’m shown into a vast library with polished wooden floors and a view across the Arno. After five minutes, a woman comes to take our coffee order. ‘This is not a normal language school,’ I say, gesturing around. She shrugs. Italy is full of foreigners feigning amazement at this or that fact of life. 

I’ve been studying Italian for about five years, on and off. I sometimes joke that I took it up hoping to talk to a girl I once met, only to discover we had nothing to talk about. This is truer than it sounds. The other reason was to read Dante. When I try to interest my rattled teacher at the Institute in a conversation about Dante, she shakes her head. She did Dante at school. She doesn’t want to go through all that again. The first hour of my first lesson goes quickly, the second decelerates as it approaches the close. The asymptote is familiar from double Physics. An experienced second language can tread water for an hour or so, but once tiredness sets in it becomes harder to go on. Mysteriously, this is where the real learning seems to happen: when you’re forced to stop mentally translating from English, to speak without being able to think. 

I first came to Florence the same summer I started learning Italian in earnest, and first staggered down through the Inferno. I remember struggling with the poem’s geography, the huge ridges that Dante and Virgil travel up before descending down into the next bolgia, or sub-circle, of hell. One day