A Florence Morning

There is a particular smell to a Florence morning in springtime.

Damp stone, warmed by the first sun after an early shower. Jasmine on the garden wall scenting the air. A thread of olive woodsmoke drifting up from a house down the hill, soothing in a way I can’t quite explain. Espresso from a cafe two blocks away in the village, carried on air so clean it feels like it’s been rinsed. Cypress. Wild rosemary. The faint, sweet rot of old wisteria petals on the cobblestones.

The bells start at seven. First one church — an ancient stone tower in the village — then another, then a third answering from across the valley, until the whole hillside is talking to itself in bronze.

I have been waking up to this for three weeks.

I live, for now, in an old stone farmhouse in the hills above the city. The windows are tall and the shutters are green, and when I push them open in the morning, the valley spreads out below me like a painting someone began 400 years ago and simply never finished. Olive groves. Terracotta roofs. Yellow villas. A ribbon of road disappearing into a stand of umbrella pines. Light the color of honey.

I did not come here for the view.

I came here to be a student again.

Just a Painter

The first day at the Florence Academy of Art, they put us in a circle and asked us to introduce ourselves. When my turn came, I said my first name. I said I was from Austin. I said I had triplets. I said I had been painting for a couple of decades.

That was all.

No magazine. No company. No convention. No show. No movement. Just a guy from Texas who holds a brush.

I know how that sounds. Let me say it plainly, because I do not want to dress it up: I did not leave those things out because I thought anyone would recognize me. Most people in that room had never heard of any of it, and that was exactly the point. I left them out because I have worn those roles for so long that I had forgotten what it felt like to stand in a room without them. To not be the host, or the publisher, or the person someone was waiting to ask a question of. To just be another painter at another easel, trying to get one more value right.

For five weeks, I wanted to carry nothing.

I wanted to see who I was underneath.

Men like me carry our work as our identity. I came here hoping to find a different one — that of an artist, quietly confident he knows what he’s doing.

The Third Day

By the third day, I was asking myself what on earth I had done.

The work was relentless. Early mornings. Full days at the easel. Lectures on Mondays and Fridays. Museum trips on weekends.

People warned me I would get fatigued from standing at an easel eight hours a day. What they didn’t tell me is that my shoulders would ache from constant use. My hand ached. My feet ached. My pride ached, because I was surrounded by 20- and 30-year-olds drawing circles around me, and I had arrived with some quiet assumption that the years would count for more than they did.

There were evenings the room grew small around me. Not sad, exactly. Not homesick. Just small. The kind of quiet that settles in when you are alone in a country where you can’t speak the language, and the body you have been asking a great deal of for a great many years decides, politely, that it has had enough.

I had planned to film my YouTube show five days a week on top of all of this.

I cut it to Mondays and Fridays. I am not Superman. I never was, really; I just had not admitted that out loud in a while.

There was a morning, in the middle of an especially challenging exercise, when I genuinely wondered if I had made a serious mistake coming here. I was stuck. I didn’t feel like I could pull myself out of it. And for the first time in a long time, I lost some of my confidence.

Something Began Turning

Then, slowly, something began to turn.

The students became friends. Not because of anything I had done before I arrived, but because we were sharing the same struggle, the same charcoal dust, the same humbling in front of the same plaster cast. A few sharp-eyed painters eventually pieced together who I was and quietly asked for marketing advice, which I gave between classes the way a plumber might help a neighbor on a Saturday.

But the gift of the month was the blending in. The anonymity. The stripping away. And the discovery that I could do things I really didn’t think I could do … drawing the human figure in exact proportion, rendering a plaster cast in charcoal, painting the best still life I’ve ever done.

I discovered etching. Copper plates, acid, ink, the smell of the press room, a whole medium I had never touched, and somewhere in the second week I fell for it the way a teenager falls for a song on the radio. I have a new love. I did not come looking for one.

A Painting Everywhere

I discovered that the Tuscan countryside, from the road that winds out of the hills, is a painting around every corner. I have driven with a camera in my hand and taken hundreds of photographs of cypresses, stone villas, and impossible light. I have never felt more connected to a piece of land in my life. Not to the people, because I cannot speak to them. To the land itself. To the light falling across it at six in the evening.

Florence inside the walls has been loved to death. The Uffizi moves you through like cattle in a chute now. But 15 minutes up the hill, the cypresses stand the way they have stood for 400 years, and nobody is in a hurry.

The Accidental Sabbatical

Here is the strange part, and the part I want to sit with for a moment.

This was not supposed to be a sabbatical. I have been on company calls most nights from 9:30 until midnight. Decisions have been made. Fires have been put out. The business has not paused for a second.

And yet.

Somehow, for the first time in years, I have had time. Time to walk. Time to sit. Time to stare out a window at a valley and let a thought finish itself before another one interrupts. Time to ask questions I have been too busy to ask.

What do I want the rest of my life to look like?

What am I doing out of love, and what am I doing out of habit?

Is this hillside whispering something I ought to be listening to, or is it just a beautiful rental?

If my wife said, “Let’s sell the house and spend spring and fall here,” would I say yes? (I think I would say yes in a heartbeat. That surprises me.)

I have not come to any conclusions. I want to be honest about that. I am not writing to you from the other side of an epiphany. I am writing from the middle of a long, useful, unfinished question.

But I have come to believe that the questions themselves are the point. That a life without them gets narrower without telling you it’s getting narrower. That somewhere between 20 and 60, most of us stop asking and start managing, and the managing feels so much like living that we do not notice the difference.

I needed this. I did not know how badly until I got here. And I already know it’s not going to last long enough.

Two weeks from now I will be on a plane. PACE begins the moment I land. The routine will close over me like a warm bath, and I will be glad for it, because I love what I do.

But I will not be the same man who got on the plane going over.

Take The Coat Off

So here is what I want to leave you with, while your coffee is still warm.

You have built something. A career. A family. A reputation in a small pond or a large one. Whatever it is, the thing you built has quietly become the thing you are. You wear it like a coat so comfortable you have forgotten you are wearing it.

Take the coat off for a little while.

Go somewhere nobody is waiting on you. Try something you’re bad at. Sit in a room with people half your age and let them be better than you, because they are. Leave your title in a drawer at home. See who you are without it.

You do not need five weeks in Tuscany. You need three days in a cabin, or a Saturday in a class across town, or a morning on a bench with a sketchbook and no phone. Something. Anything that makes the armor come off.

And when it does, ask yourself the questions I am asking myself.

What do I want the rest of this to look like?

What am I no longer willing to do in my life?

What am I doing out of love, and what am I doing out of habit?

What is whispering to me that I have been too loud to hear?

You may not come home with answers. I haven’t.

But you will come home asking better questions.

And your life will thank you for it.

Yours from a hillside above Florence,

Eric Rhoads