Andrei Tarkovsky's House (Via San Niccolò 91)

Via San Niccolo runs along the left bank of the Arno, beneath the hill that climbs up to Piazzale Michelangelo. It is an ordinary residential street with few tourists. On the building at number 91, there is a memorial plaque, and it is easy to walk right past it. Andrei Tarkovsky lived here from 1983 to 1986. He left the Soviet Union to shoot Nostalghia and did not return, and Florence did something you do not usually expect from a city: it gave him honorary citizenship and an apartment where he could live and work. The apartment was on the fifth floor, and he set up his study higher up, in the attic on the sixth. Three years is not much, and they coincided with the hardest period of his life. Here he was putting the finishing touches on Nostalghia and also preparing The Sacrifice, his final film. He died in Paris in December 1986. The memorial plaque on this building was unveiled in December 2006, twenty years after his death, by decision of the Florence city council. And today, at that very same address, the Florence branch of the International Andrei Tarkovsky Institute is in operation. It was founded in 1988 by his widow, son, and friends, with founders including Robert Bresson, Mstislav Rostropovich, and Krzysztof Zanussi. The institute maintains three addresses, Paris, Florence, and Moscow, and the Florentine one is precisely this house. Making a special trip here is probably not worth it. But if in the evening you are walking up to Piazzale Michelangelo for the view of the city, and almost everyone walks up there, you walk right past it. A two-minute stop, and an ordinary house on an ordinary street becomes meaningful.