What Authenticity?

Tourist filled Piazza de RepublicaFlorence holds it own issues about authenticity. Florence is a city of tourists, a city catered towards, and inhabited mostly by recent immigrants and students. Florence is the biggest study abroad city in the world, and it is much easier to find another American student in Florence then an actual Italian citizen. It took me a few weeks to realize how few Italian people live inside the city. My assumption was that all of the Italian speaking residents around me were in fact, Italian. I was very wrong. Florence is filled with Serbian, Albanian, Greek and Macedonian immigrants. Most will come to Florence to go to school or to work in tourist industries, and will travel back and forth to home or will only stay for a few years and will return home permanently. I have found that most Italian people live in the suburbs of Florence. Many of these suburbs are very close, with just a short bus ride separating them and the city. The problem is that they will come into the city for work, and then return to the suburbs in the evening, giving us little chance to meet. This also means that it is very difficult to pick out "authentic" things in Florence. Is the thin pizza found at the trattoria down the street authentic, or the doughy pizza people wait in line for across the Arno? When so much of a city is ran by and catered to foreigners, it is easy for the lines of authenticity to get blurred. In this way their is a "strained truthfulness" in many aspects of the florentine lifestyle. I have also found that at some point you have to stop obsessing about authenticity. I have come to Florence to experience what it has to give, that includes the tourist spots of interest, the small Osterias off the beat and track, and making friends with a few Serbians who speak worse Italian then I do.