300 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS
“Nothing”—Maria smiled creamily—“that a nice, long nap back at the Villa Carol wouldn’t cure. My God, Cat, you’re actually blushing.” “I am not.” I laughed but knew that I was. I wondered what she would have thought if I had said, Whose room at the Villa Carol? We had thought to linger among the sculptures in the Loggia dei Lanzi, but we had lost time in the gallery, and the driver was meeting us up in the Piazza della Signoria at noon. It was eleven now, and we were both powerfully thirsty. So we hurried through it toward one of the outdoor caffès. Even so, it was inescapably more of the same: flesh, naked and palpable, somehow even more so than the paintings. This was secret flesh bared to the air and sun of the world, flesh that could be touched, that cried out to be handled. Bandinrelli’s bulbous Hercules, that Cellini had compared to “an old sack of melons.” Ammanati’s Neptune Fountain, that the sculptor himself piously declared later to be an incitement to licentiousness. Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine Women, leaving no doubt at all as to who was doing what to whom. Donatello’s impassive and somehow profoundly corrupt Judith and Holofernes, nearby. And Michelangelo’s David. Even when we sat down at last for caffè granita, our eyes went to the David, again and again. “It’s no wonder the Medici coat of arms has balls on it,” Maria said, sitting in deep shade but stretching her legs out to the sun. They were brown now, sleek, newly shaved and lotioned. Her toes, in sandals, were bare and polished. I laughed. “You seem to have noticed everything.” “How could you not? There are balls everywhere in Florence. Every guild sign and palace and church and