FLORENCE, singular

Solo but more connected than ever, ALEXANDRA CARLTON takes an uncompromising tour through the Renaissance city.

- ALEXANDRA CARLTON

On my first evening in Florence I set off from my riverside hotel, the wonderfully eccentric Antica Torre di Via Tornabuoni with my brain buzzing with recommendations. I’m awash with lists from Italian and expat friends. My WhatsApp bulges with trattorias and osterias and the one forno you have to try and my Google maps app is a sea of green “Want to Go” dots. In mid-April the air is crisp, my sneakers are sturdy. My plan is to weave along the narrow, cobblestone streets until I find the most exquisite Florentine meal, to mark the start of my five-day solo Florence journey.

Except that’s not what happens. One by one, even in the furthest outskirts of Santa Croce and San Frediano, I arrive at towering wooden 16th-century doors, rough, sand-coloured pietraforte limestone walls with flowery-script signs overhead that have stood for hundreds of years. And beside them, queues of tourists with exactly the same idea.

This is what travel can be like these days, particularly in the more popular European cities. Throngs. Hordes. Everyone thinking they’ve deep-dived far enough into obscure recommendations that they’ll be the only person who knows about that untouched mom-and-pop place that makes the best traditional bistecca Fiorentina. Yet the algorithm has made sure that thousands of others know about it too.

After three or four of these disappointments, I trudge back into the packed crowds around the touristy centre of the city. If I can’t go obscure I may as well just eat, I think.