Florentine Desserts

Photo by Christine Grimsby

Early morning in Florence in 1991, painting the Duomo's parabolic silhouette haloed by the rising sun's rays; its mass of marble and tile still cool from the night before, shadowing laundry lines tethered beneath its arc with their white sheets held drooping like damp flags, awaiting their daily surrender to the afternoon heat that comes in two or three hour slices between buildings in winter.

The same morning while walking in Boboli Garden, I stopped to admire a paving pattern of narrow stones and imagine the agile fingers that painstakingly pieced them together, when I saw a figure behind a line of cypress. Moving silently as a cat, it was a woman practicing Tai-chi. I didn't think her human, save for exhalations coming at regular intervals and hanging about her like a mist; her hands sliced clear paths through it and the still December air.

Zuccotto- Genoise in paving pattern, soaked with rum syrup; Cream filling punctuated by the crunch of almond and hazelnut praeline.