Searching for Leonardo da Vinci's Gay Florence

Condé Nast Traveler

9 hours ago

Florence's present-day gay sites are not faring much better. Today, actual gay bars are rare in the city, but this wasn't always the case. 'Florence in the 1970s and '80s had nightclubbing that went down in national annals,' Elena Guerra of Viandando Luxury Travel, who specializes in 'non-conventional' tours of Italy, told me. 'The two most legendary clubs in Europe at the time were Taboo in London, and the Tabasco right here in Florence.'
Guerra and I met on a December evening in Florence, at a table outside Café Volume in Santo Spirito, where she ordered us both an americano. 'It's the Florentine version of a negroni,' she explained; it has Campari and sweet vermouth, but club soda replaces the gin. When I asked what happened to the Tabasco, Guerra said, 'It's been closed for years. And it wasn't the only one to close.' She punctuated her long sigh with a drag of her cigarette, then said, 'The queer scene here in Florence has less momentum than it used to.'
Calanca shared similar sentiments: 'Fabrik, between Florence and Prato, is the only real gay club left in all of Tuscany.' According to both Calanca and Guerra, overtourism in Florence is part of the reason: The city now welcomes over 13 million tourists a year, a number that overwhelms the local population of just under 400,000 and continues to increase. Yet queer nightclubs and bars have continued to shutter. In addition to the closure of the Tabasco, roving parties like Flog have also stopped operating in recent years. Even more traditional queer events like an annual Pride are not a fixture in the city, despite its significant queer history. (Florence does participate in a Tuscany-wide Pride; this year's is in Prato, in late June.) When I asked Guerra if there were any queer events still held in the city, she said the Florence Queer Film Festival, now in its 23rd year, is perhaps one of the city's last annual LGBTQ+ events. These days, she admitted, 'Rome and Milan are much more active than Florence.'