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THE FLOOR MEDALLION: A HISTORY Florence-Lauderdale Public Library Florence, Alabama Florence, Alabama, is the largest of four smallish towns (total population, 140,000) that comprise the Florence Metropolitan Area. It was designed by Italian surveyor Ferdinand Sannoner in 1818. This young, 23-year-old surveyor was a native of Tuscany and, when he was given permission to name the new Alabama town, he chose Florence as a tribute to his favorite Italian city by the same name. Over the years, there have been tentative efforts at maintaining the connection between the city of Florence, Alabama, and its Italian counterpart. Local historians, in particular, have kept careful records of the life and times of Ferdinand Sannoner and of his genius in designing a town with streets as wide as 115 feet and a public park almost exactly in the center of the downtown grid of streets. In 1987, a group of community volunteers decided that a fitting connection between the two cities would be a Renaissance Faire. Since the Italian Renaissance began in Florence (Firenze) in the 13th century, a re-enactment of a Renaissance-era trade fair seemed very appropriate. What began as a small happening has evolved, eighteen years later, into an excellent regional Faire that attracts 35,000 to the two-day event on the fourth weekend in October. (An authentic Renaissance Feast precedes the Faire on the third Saturday in October.) The Florence City Council has caught the spirit of these two events and has officially named Florence, Alabama, the Renaissance City. Its logo is now the giglio (the Italian version of the French fleur de lis) and appears on all public signage, tourism-related brochures, city stationery, etc. Enter the Florence Main Street program. In 1992, local officials decided that the city should join Alabama's Main Street program, an affiliate of the national program by the same name. Subsequently, Florence's program was judged the best in the state. In 1998, one of its four committees, Design, determined that it wished to present a permanent gift to the city in celebration of the new millennium. So it set about to determine just the right choice for this extraordinary event. After many discussions over a period of weeks, the committee found its solution in the new public library building that was, at that time, still on the drawing board. Should the gift be a fountain for the garden at the rear of the new building? Should it be a bronze statute for some corner inside? A meeting with the architect provided the answer. As part of the interior design, the architect had included two large circles in the floor – a 20 foot-diameter circle in the main rotunda; the other, a 10-foot-diameter at one of the two entries. Through collaboration with the architect, the committee determined that a permanent medallion or mosaic in the 10-foot circle was the perfect gift. A member of the committee made contact with Anne Leslie Warren, a Florence native with her own interior design business, W Design Group, in New York City. Warren enlisted the assistance of Joost De Quack, a New Yorker who hails from the The Netherlands and specializes in creating beautiful things from various types of stone and tile. The two of them agreed on a basic design and fine tuned it to the satisfaction of the firm in Florida that would execute their ideas. Three large giglios (in black marble with flecks of imbedded gold imported from Florence, Italy) would be the focal point of the large circle. Its perimeter would have two narrow bands of black marble with a wider band of gold marble between them. Inscribed in black on the gold band, these words would appear three times: "Ex Libris Florentinis" – classical Latin for "From the Books of Florence." So the dream of Florence Main Street's Design Committee had come true. But how to pay for it? Warren and Joost had done their work pro bono, but there was the matter of marble and design execution and shipping (ever so carefully) from the fabrication site in Florida to the new library building in Alabama. Here's the way it happened: Members of the Design Committee developed a calendar for the year 2000. Each page boasted an artistic black-and-white photograph of a downtown Florence building with a brief history of that building accompanying it. The sale of that calendar was so successful that the committee created a second one for the year 2001. These were followed by a well-publicized guided tour of selected upper-floor apartments in downtown Florence commercial buildings (a phenomenon that has since caught on in other Main Street cities in Alabama), aptly called "Upstairs in Downtown." Then a retired professor of art from the local university agreed to do a pen-and-ink sketch of the new public library. Copies of his sketch were published: some as signed artist's proofs, others as signed-and-numbered prints, while still others as unsigned prints. These were sold to a public anxious to have a memento of the library's grand opening which was held to great applause on December 10, 2002. This story, then, is actually a tale of four cities: Florence, Italy; Florence, Alabama; New York, New York; and Tampa, Florida. All played significant roles in bringing to a successful conclusion a project which produced a thing of beauty that is truly worthy of being called a millennium gift to a fine Southern town. |