Six in the morning and the guide is already handing me the mint. Everyone knows why before they know why. I hold it to my nose and understand: this is not garnish, this is armor. Below the terrace, the vats open up like a hundred eyes, ochre and saffron and a blue that has no business existing in a place this dry. Men move between them barefoot, up to the knee in dye, and nobody looks up at the tourists on the roofs. Why would they. We are not the interesting part of this.
The smell arrives before the light does. Ammonia, pigeon droppings, wet wool, something sweeter underneath that I choose not to ask about. My camera sits heavy against my chest, and for a while I do not lift it. Some scenes need to be smelled before they can be seen. The 35mm can wait. It usually can.
A man in the pit below raises a hide over his head, turns it, drops it in the next vat without looking, the way you’d flip an omelet you’ve made four thousand times. He has been doing this since before I was born. His father did it. His father’s father dipped hides in the same stone hollows, and the leather goes out from here to shops with better lighting and worse stories. I think about all the belts and bags in Milan boutiques that started their life as a smell like this one, and something in me softens toward every overpriced jacket I’ve ever judged.
The light finally comes over the wall, slow, orange, unbothered by the hour. It hits the yellow vats first, like it’s choosing favorites. I lift the camera then. One frame. That’s usually all a place like this needs, if you’ve actually been paying attention instead of just pointing.
*Saudade* is a word for missing something before it’s gone, and I feel it standing there, already grieving the version of this courtyard that existed a hundred years ago, knowing it’ll look almost the same in another hundred. The tanneries don’t care about my nostalgia. They have hides to turn.
Someone below finally notices us, waves, goes back to work. The mint in my hand has gone warm and a little bruised from holding it too tight. I don’t drop it. Some souvenirs you’re not supposed to photograph.
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