What a difference the sun makes

It's an incredible day in Florence today, with bright sunshine that has finally shed the chills of winter, and the whole city looks different.
This morning started as my Florentine Saturdays often start with a trip to the San Ambrodgio market. Less touristy than the Central Market, and much nearer to my house, its a small building, in a piazza, surrounded on a Saturday morning by fruit and veg vendors, calling out the highlights of their wares. This morning the Maremma artichokes were getting a big push, but given that I am never entirely sure what to do with them, and have no desire in this sunshine to be inside studying cookbooks, I plumped for foodstuffs that I was a lot more familiar with.
Having bumped into a colleague and having a natter (for a city, this place is really a village) I wandered home and made myself a salad. The mixed lettuce looks like it was in someone's garden this morning, and mixed with feta, yellow pepper, and ox heart tomatoes, with some lemon juice and olive oil from a frantoio in Marche, it was a delicious lunch on the balcony in the sunshine.
In the height of the summer, the city groans with the weight of tourists struggling in the 40 degree heat in lines behind their umbrella/flag/sunflower-toting guide, red-faced and with inappropriate footwear for Florence's broken and beat-up roads and pavements. But they are not here yet. Right now Florence more or less belongs to those of us who live here.
And the sunshine in the city reminds us of the reasons why we do.