Diary

David Craig

Anne and I step aside from the slow-motion procession of tourists walking among the market stalls of Florence in the roasting sunshine and enter the Baptistery, a compact octagonal church with oblong-patterned, black-and-white façades like an enormous liquorice allsort. Our heads tilt upwards and we stare at the swarming life of the eight mosaic panels in the cupola, a hundred feet above us. Through my binoculars I can make out a colossal devil sitting in a cleft rock. He is horned and muscular and rather human. His forehead is corrugated as though in distress at his own evildoing. From each of his ears a snake oozes with a naked person writhing in its jaws. Between the sleek worm of his moustache and the black ringlets of his beard the broad mouth is gulping somebody whole. In each hand he clutches another naked human – a ‘sinner’, no doubt – their skin scored by his nails. Nearby, frogs are raping women and lizards are biting at people’s thighs. As Dante was being baptised here seven hundred and forty years ago, his baby eyes might have tried to focus on this scene.