We kept walking, the street mostly in shadow, buildings on either side so close they blocked much of the sky. I asked where she’d grown up and was not surprised when she said the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She had that combination of cool and sophistication Manhattan kids wore like a second skin. I was sure she’d gone to private school too.

“Friends,” she said when I asked.

I would have guessed one of the tonier uptown schools like Nightingale or Brearley. “Is there a Friends School in Manhattan? I only know the one in Brooklyn.”

“Brooklyn,” she said.

“And your parents didn’t mind you traveling all the way from the Upper East Side?”

“My parents are divorced,” she said as if that explained it. “But aren’t everyone’s?”

“Not mine,” I said. “They got a life sentence, no parole in sight.”

“Not happy?”

“I don’t think the word is in their vocabulary, plus they don’t have the money to get divorced.”

“Oh,” she said, and for a minute, I thought she was looking at me differently, sizing me up as if searching for signs of poverty. She asked where I was from, and I admitted to New Jersey, then changed the subject, asked what had brought her to Florence.

“I’m finishing a doctorate…in…medieval history.”

“Ergo the plague book.”

“Just for fun,” she said and smiled.

“Where are you studying?”

“Barnard. You know—the women’s part of Columbia.”

I was not surprised she was attending an Ivy League school. No way I’d be admitting to two years of community college where I’d worked my ass off to create the portfolio that got me into art school. “So you’re a smart girl too.”

“Too?”

“Smart and beautiful too.”

“Your Italian heritage is showing,” she said, “again.”

“Sorry. Men are always in trouble, no matter what they say.”

“It’s not just what they say but how they say it. But you’re not in trouble. Not yet.” She added a half smile. “By the way, I know that book on the plague is available in the States. It’s just part of an excuse to be here, but does one really need one?” She did a half turn on her boot heels. “I mean, it’s so beautiful.”

“Sure is,” I said, watching her twirl gracefully, as if she had studied ballet, and she probably had. Obviously well-to-do, the kind of woman my younger self could not have imagined dating, let alone strolling with through the streets of Florence.

“Orsanmichele,” she said, indicating a stone fortress-like building. “Let’s go in, okay?”

Inside, it was like no other church, possibly square-shaped with an off-center altar, no tall windows to illuminate the space, which was dark. The few people milling around were lost in the shadows.

“It was once a granary,” Alexandra said, and I remembered it now from my teaching, the grain market that became a church. I recognized the ornate tabernacle too, even more lavish in person, like a miniature Gothic church, white marble, inlaid with lapis and gold, built around a brightly colored painting of the Madonna.