The breeze carried the odour of herbs and burning wood through the hills. A sign on the stone pointed down a track towards the trees. In the woods of Monteceri seven or eight species of conifer obeyed the action of the wind. On the walk back to the Via Santa Maria, I wandered up the lesser path to the convent, having missed the place I came to see.

The following day I took a COPIT bus to Poggio a` Ciaiano. Inside the Medici villa there is a Baroque theatre, with a fete galante on the safety curtain, a gallery and doors that open onto a loggia and a view down over Florence. The theatre inside appeared to invite me outside too. Beyond the garden an early summer began, a football match ended. The smell of orange blossom, the shade from innumerable trees, the sound of voices, all brought me pleasure.

It was here in 1545, upon his return from France, that Benvenuto Cellini, the sculptor and goldsmith, came with the sole purpose of paying his proper respects to Duke Lorenzo the Magnificent and where the duke offered Cellini a branch from his pear tree as a symbol of property. In fact Cellini’s timely reappearance was a devious manoeuvre to grab work from his rival contender, Bandinelli. The bid failed and Cellini had to make do with the commission for a bronze Perseus. A block of Carrara marble, ten and a half braccia high and five braccia wide was brought by boat up the Arno, which was not navigable as far as Florence, and then moved by road to Poggio a` Ciaiano. Cellini studied it and ‘knew very well that the Duchess by her special influence had contrived to have it allotted to Bandinelli.’

Had Lorenzo the Magnificent’s rebuff and swift reconciliation been the start of a new accord between Cellini and his benefactors?  Cellini devoted many pages in his Autobiography to a compelling description of the statue’s design and casting and yet neither the exacting technical demands nor its finished beauty prompted a remit from Lorenzo or an extension of his rights. Although Cellini was given the run-around, his statue turned out to be far better than Bandinelli’s work.

The city of Benvenuto Cellini’s birth was also the city of his death. He never stayed in any one place at one time more than two years. Just as his writing has become famous but little read, his work as a sculptor - apart from the famous gold Salt Cellar - has been undervalued. For example there exist artistic forces in his Narcissus, Apollo and Hyacinth that express the male and female side of individuals with equal intensity. The largely dictated self-justification, written when he was over fifty, was a device to pass through that worst of exiles: within the place you belong. Forced by circumstance to remain in a city where he was forbidden to accept commissions, Cellini recorded his experiences of being and doing. Episodic in character, as well as exuberant and naïve, the book has become recognised as a work of literature. It is the moral vindication of an artist who believed highly in existence and thought nobly of action - including murder. Cellini killed four men in cold blood, if you don’t count his defence of Castel San Angelo in Rome on behalf of Pope Clement VII.

Oscar Wilde understood the mixture of grit, charm and beauty in the Autobiography and harangued the miners of Leadville, Colorado, on the proximity of roughness and sensitivity in the goldsmith before turning his attention to a heavy night’s drinking.

Cellini knew in his heart the cruel ambition required of any artist who foresaw a life for himself beyond the gutter. Two hundred years after the Florentine died, Rousseau indicted both the profession of author and of goldsmith as unnecessary and even harmful luxury trades. Nowadays, gold and silver-smithing survive in Florence, in particular the manufacture of trinkets for tourists. ‘All Florentines,’ noted Vasari, ‘tend to spend most of their energy hanging around shops busy with nothing other than speaking ill of the work of others.’ Here was one who knew.

Because he worked, Cellini always knew what others about him were doing. If they were poor artisans, he encouraged them in a friendly way. If they were beyond his capability and out of his class, like Michelangelo, he was subservient. If they were his equals, he hated them. Usually art and trouble with women were hopelessly mixed up in his melees. On his migrations he would become a favourite with other skilled workers and then take their female friends from them. He discovered humans are complaisant and do not like to be reminded of it. Then would come the social jealousies. He would tire of the woman, or she of him more probably, then if she took up with another goldsmith, he would indulge in masochism. Certain that they were plotting to undo him, he listened to their remarks and lay in wait for them, watched their actions, questioned their friends. Suddenly some dark night he would spring upon them from behind a corner and cry: ‘You are all dead folk!’ and sometimes they were. Then he would flee without leaving a forwarding address. He learned how to preserve a secret by delivering a part of his personality which he had either finished with or which had undergone previous examination by his contemporaries.

Cellini left behind his creative continuity as an artist and, for the portion of his life spent in the enterprise of the Autobiography, he embraced another kind of search, the search to place a single raised voice. The book contains a complete record of his struggle. Thus many famous people are absent or lightly sketched, while a foundry owner, or a musician his father had known, or a soldier he had once conversed with at the Vatican, are present. It is the work of a social persona whose democratic programme suggests an egalitarian vision only of the world outside art, where he is at ease with the idea that every human being is unique, and every event singular. Away from the grip of patronage he redresses human injustices and gives us all a valid chance at eternity.

Through the pages, artists and their minions are always lying, at every opportunity, every minute, but because they never stop they no longer realise they are lying. And when everyone lies, no one lies. The story takes on its own direction, where data are insufficient and facts unknown. In the penumbra where objects acquire shadows and outlines start to blur, the Autobiography is Cellini’s compliment, an endorsement of his own hope. It contains all of life and all the terror that comes of knowing death.

One evening in my tiny room adjoining a medieval palace, I re-read the Autobiography from cover to cover. The street outside my window at Locanda Davanzati was mostly deserted. Once the barman on the corner of the Via de Vechietti, always a cautious man, came out to inspect his empty terrace, glanced suspiciously around and targeted on a solitary male. The barman glared at him and the young man moved away. A group of people were gathering for a CP rally. A Rupert Brooke lookalike, wearing a curious embroidered fez and green velvet jacket, stood on the piazza side of the bar. The young man lay sprawled on the ground looking very ill. The poetic looking fellow lifted him by the shoulders, although it soon became apparent that he was better off on the ground. After a while he left him there in a wretched heap. Six doctors from the Misericordia ran up to examine him. The ambulance people returned carrying a stretcher.

Accompanied by a Carabinieri they took the young man away. One of the CP delegates who had also observed the incident from start to finish stopped kneading his hands and jotted down notes in a little book. I closed the window and as I went back inside I reflected on how, in many ways, the mood of Florence remains unchanged since the cinquecento: at any hour of the day, timeless characters might appear on street corners in suddenly dramatic scenarios.

Cellini managed his Life like a series of installations, elaborate film set-ups, with props and violent actions. He seemed to court loaded situations and danger certainly occurred to him, particularly in Rome.

I visited the vaults at the Vatican Library out of curiosity really, to see what was actually there. The letters and manuscripts relating to Cellini were in disarray. The speaker of memoirs had left other evidence, invoices, requests, admonishments, addressed to every kind of civil servant and this oddness about him was something he had introduced into his work, not only in a direct way, but also by association. The atmosphere of his book had stayed in these forgotten letters, which were unearthly or disturbing at times, but on other occasions funny.

Bedlam.  At Rome terminus one train arrived on the same track where another tried to depart.  There were many announcements on the loudspeakers.  A Roman will sooner give wrong information than say he doesn't know.  "I think it's a twenty-four hour strike ... "  "Did I hear correctly - a total stoppage?"  "There are no more trains to Florence?  They were queuing for refunds at the ticket office."  "It is a just experience," said a commuter.  "Where are all the railway-men but on the beaches cultivating their suntans. The division between suffering caused and pleasure gained has to be demonstrated."  Then a fast train did arrive and to my relief I was traveling back to Florence.

On a level with the grassy area of Fort Belvedere, a bell in the turret of Santa Giorgio rang out. The chimes of Santa Maria Novella ensued and before they had ended the boom of the Duomo bell became syncopated with a clanging somewhere behind. The hills were turning blue, the villas appeared like scattered paper, the right-hand segments of the Duomo remained in sunlight. Far away two geometers glistened before a suspension bridge. Across the Ponte Santa Trinita a large flag hung from an Embassy. On the V-shaped pier supporting the northern-most span, a group of students sat drinking wine, their faces glistening like molten metal. This is when all the bells seemed to toll at once and the cypress trees shot up above the hillside. The sky appeared to become a Renaissance opera with angels on black cotton wool clouds. Luxurious music played in my mind. Then the bells sounded off in unison, echoed by the hills above.