Mr Peter Biggs

Strange thing.

I come from a small, boutique city – Wellington, New Zealand. It’s an intimate place – population: 500,000 – and the city is held in a confined hug by the hills and the harbour.

Here I am in Melbourne – a much more spread out city with a population over 3 million. Yet, I feel so very much at home here.

Maybe size has nothing to do with how settled you feel in a city. Possibly, it’s all about how a city has shaped itself – or been shaped – so that a human being feels somehow “in scale”.

I’m a Gemini – so, naturally, I’m now going to make a completely illogical leap: to Renaissance Italy, in fact.

In Florence, during the early part of the Renaissance, 15th Century painters (Piero della Francesca being one of them) created pictures of ideal towns – mainly in order to demonstrate their mastery of perspective. Their civic spaces are both architectural harmonies and the perfect setting for social beings.

Alberti, in his great book on building, describes the necessity of public squares where “young men maybe diverted from the mischievousness and folly natural to their age” and where, under handsome porticoes, “old men may spend the heat of the day and be mutually serviceable to one another”.

Florence, during the early Renaissance, was a truly urban culture. In fact, it was bourgeois – in the absolutely proper sense of the term. People spent their time in the streets and squares and shops. A good Florentine, it was said, “sta sempre a bottega” – was always in the shops.

In Melbourne, almost six hundred years later, I find myself strolling through elegant squares and spaces, admiring architectural harmonies. I am surrounded by fellow citizens enjoying social and physical recreation – pottering about the many parks and public gardens; mingling around the Arts Centre and Federation Square; enjoying theatre, music, dance and film; exploring the fascinating lanes of the central city; and frequenting the world-class shops.

I think a 15th century Florentine would feel very much at home here.

I certainly do.