Sunday 23^rd October 2011

I’m on a visit to Florence with the Gay Mother. We’re in a flatti just off Via Tornabuoni which was rather smelly to begin with but has responded superbly to vigorous airing as well as a list of suggestions to the owners (‘Get that sofa vac-ed and sprayed’). The Gay Mother has washed up abroad for the first time in 60 years, if ever. I don’t think she camped or villa-ed in her life, she always hotel-ed, even in her twenties, in the 40s.

I’ll tell you all about apartment life another time. You should definitely take one too in Rome, Venice, Florence or Paris. You can get the full hotel effect, more or less, for half the price with four times the space, the Prada shop downstairs to be included in the start-of-day drive for morning goods and all the glamour of residency.

I’ve got fashion tips coming up. Poor Little Rich Gays must suddenly brace after this late fine weather for autumn and winter modes. Florence is a tiny little place. Just imagine going into Colchester or Chipping Camden and finding Prada, Gucci, Bottega Veneta, Chanel, Burberry and Dolce e Gabbana. I’ve learnt so much.

What I’m thinking: Is this where the Poor Little Rich Gays started?  Is this why instinctively we home in on Tuscany? Have you heard of the Renaissance? It was an awfully good idea and started in about the 1400s. Everyone got out from under the grim thumb of God and thought:  we’re rather marvellous, so clever and capable, let’s order the world for our own delight rather than God’s. Hence, harmonious classical architecture on a human scale revived (but much more fuss to do), art celebrating the human form, expressive, full of colour and lavishness. Entrepreneurs sprang up: the Medicis were bankers in Florence who made a pile and ordered art like the Multis. I must find out more about them. Were they PLRG? I’ve heard they could be rather difficult.

It could just be that the path leading to the Poor Little Rich Gays, who are an ornamental end in themselves, began in the Renaissance. The Middle Ages, with madrigals, those pastry-people being punished you see in paintings and nooky, wooky, beamy wiggly chambers, we just couldn’t have taken.

We went to the Laurentian Library here in Florence; it’s of classical design, architect, Michelangelo. This is the beginning of getting it right, not just cramming in for quaint effect in the medieval manner. In the entrance hall the space was too high and too narrow; the perfectly balanced classical design could not quite be achieved. Michelangelo had to quietly bend the rules; oh the detail and the thought! He had outsize scrolls low down to draw the eye away from the excessive height. In the corners there’s some colliding of elements (see graph below) but better this than shrink the entire design out of proportion.

I see a direct line of descent to Bruce MacBain, my private architect, instructing a Polish builder as to the tiling module in a Poor Little Rich Gay bathroom. Indeed once Bruce fitted elegantly three toilets under stairs in a house in Hampstead, in one of which a millionairess got stuck.

Yesterday we took Benozzo Gozzoli The Adoration of the Magi at the Palazzo Ricardo Medici, another Medici-funded artwork of the Renaissance. Do you know it?   Adoration of the Magi, it may be, but really a joyous parade of fabrics, headgear, equestrian accoutrements, turquoise bootees and fantasy animals going all round the walls of the chapel where it is found . Various Medicis have got themselves put in. There are Dalmatians but their spots are fleur-de-lys arranged in rows.

Worldly, costly, riotous, showy, a little bit silly, gorgeous, Renaissance – full of life and wonder, like the Poor Little Rich Gays.

Michelangelo's Laurentian Library, Florence

Michelangelo Solves Space Problem in Staircase Entrance Hall of Laurentian Library, Florence. My Own Architect, Bruce MacBain, Would Have Done the Same

Benozzo Gozzoli: One of the Three Wise Men in Poor Little Rich Gay Style

Benozzo Gozzoli: So Called Adoration of the Magi: What Fabrics!