I spent the week in Italy, largely to attend The Secrets We Keep, a larp which ran just outside of Florence. The train from Zürich to Florence required a transfer in Milan, and I booked a room overnight there in order to see da Vinci’s The Last Supper (which I had missed the last time¹) before arriving in Florence the next day. Florence is one of those cities that I’ve been trying to get to for a while. I had a trip booked with friends in April of 2020 which obviously didn’t happen. I’m not going to say I signed up for the larp solely because I wanted to finally see the city, but it didn’t hurt.

If you know anything about Florence, you’ll know it’s incredibly hot. I drank massive amounts of just about anything I could get my hands on: water, fruit juice, soda, beer, and cocktails.² I sweated most of it away. It doesn’t help that Florence is almost too walkable; you can stroll from one end of the city core to the other in about thirty minutes, and most of the museums and churches are clustered even closer than that. So you’re outside and on your feet a lot, usually heading somewhere, right in the heat of midday. I took a lot of long breaks at cafés.

The other thing everyone knows about Florence is that it’s stuffed full of incredible art, and I’ve spent the last four days seeing as much of it as I could manage. I got back from the larp midday Sunday, and someone pointed out the Uffizi Gallery had free admission on the first Sunday of every month. I expected a long line, but we rolled up at 4:30 and got in within minutes, giving us a full two hours inside before it closed.

After that it was a blur of museums Monday and Tuesday: the Galileo Museum;³ the Duomo Museum, Baptistry, and Dome tour;⁴ the Bargello Museum;⁵ and Santa Croce.⁶ The Accademia Gallery didn’t have any reserved slots available, but I managed to scrounge up a walking tour which included skip-the-line access, so I capped my trip by seeing Michelangelo’s David on Wednesday.⁷

My takeaway? Florence is a bit much. It’s a massive amount of art and so much of it is famous⁸ that you always feel compelled to see one more gallery or one more chapel. I saw most of the things at the top of my list, but there’s at least a dozen more places I’d like to have visited, and I’m just not going to get the chance. It would take a full week running myself ragged to see everything, and at least another week recovering from it.

But even knowing all that, I’m glad to be leaving. Florence is a tourist town. I couldn’t live here, I don’t think. I’m heading to Stockholm, which is a slower pace and a cooler climate, and two weeks in Sweden sounds great right about now. I’m looking forward to spending less time playing the tourist and more time pretending to be a resident.

I may never make it back to Florence, but I think I’m okay with that. And if I do, at least I know I won’t be bored.

While I was in Florence I attended The Secrets We Keep, a larp designed and run by Chaos League in a monastery. It’s a game that was supposed to run in 2020 but kept getting postponed⁹ until it landed here. I hadn’t signed up then — the premise didn’t quite grab me when I first heard about it — but once it was reannounced and I had a gap in my schedule I decided to just book it. Quite a lot of the players were signed up since 2020, so for a lot of people it was a relief to finally play it.¹⁰

The larp is built primarily around two Stephen King works, It and Stand by Me, and delves into that feeling of returning as an adult to someplace you were when you were a child, trying to reconcile the past with the present. In The Secrets We Keep the characters are called back to the orphanage where they were all raised to scatter the ashes of Tommy, a fellow orphan who was brutally murdered decades ago. The murder was unsolved, the orphanage was shut down, and you were subsequently scattered to various foster homes.

The mood and style of the game is a vaguely defined late ’80s aesthetic the organizers termed “The Vintage Era.”¹¹ This is a little brain-bending for me; Stand by Me is obviously drenched in nostalgia for the late ’50s.¹² Playing the larp with a lot of millennials, most players aren’t nostalgic for the ’50s¹³ but the late ’80s. So while the larp is fashioned around works which look longingly back at the ’50s from the ’80s, you’re asked to inhabit the adults of those stories, so you’re actually looking back longingly at the ’80s from the present day.¹⁴

You’re not given a lot of the backstory — a large part of the larp is about recovering lost memories and dealing with the resurfaced trauma of the past — so as the game progresses more and more of the mystery is uncovered until everything is revealed by the end. There’s a mysterious supernatural horror from childhood which may or may not be responsible for the death of Tommy, an impressively comprehensive set of documents relating to the murder investigation, and a dimly-remembered trio of nuns who ran the orphanage. All that layered on top of a litany of petty cruelties all the children inflicted upon one another as eight-year-olds, many of which left lasting scars.

The players are guided through the game by a series of “chapters,” each accompanied by a narrator a lá The Wonder Years. These didn’t really serve to change the themes or the style of play¹⁵ but mostly introduced expository information. You were still playing on the memories being recovered and the growing sense of dread and horror and revelation; it just deepened and intensified as more information came to light.

The game was billed as experimental but it didn’t really seem to break any new ground, to me. I think the organizers were mostly referring to the extreme number of meta-techniques¹⁶ they incorporated into the game. There was a phone you could use to get interrogated by your conscience, a darkened room you could go to to play out scenes from your childhood with other players,¹⁷ another room you were intended to invite someone into to to play out a prescribed scene from your past, a card game over which you were intended to share your backstory with another player, a bench where you were asked to go to talk out any physical conflicts, and a handful of others. I won’t say it was too many — most players seemed to pick and choose from them and it felt like most players ended up playing about half at best — but I find myself wondering if they could have been streamlined into a few particularly impactful ones.

So overall you were playing a larp about coming-of-age, or at least about looking back pensively about coming-of-age. But there were two subthemes about horror and mystery woven into the plot. That was good, even necessary — they provided the narrative propulsion to get from the start of the larp to the end.

The horror elements centered around “Slitface,” a vaguely-defined malevolent entity which filled in for Pennywise. This ended up working better than I expected; you aren’t given an opportunity to directly interact with it¹⁸ so it largely looms over the story as an amorphous threat, the sum of all the fears of childhood made flesh. It made for some good creepy moments and some effective jump scares. I had particularly worried about whether the design could keep up the horror in a crowd of thirty people, but it turns out an dark forest at midnight is highly effective at scaring the crap out of a large group of people who are willing to let it happen,¹⁹ and the game wasn’t aiming for straight-up terror anyway.

The mystery elements were less successful, for me. The question of who killed Tommy hangs heavily over the larp — it’s called out multiple times in the narration as the thing which changed everything for all the orphans, the end of childhood for you all — and over time more and more clues are revealed. Solving the mystery is key to letting you all move on.

For pacing, then, the murderer has to be revealed right at the end of the game.²⁰ As a larp organizer, that means you need some way to guarantee when the mystery is solved. It’s simple enough to ensure there is a solution; you can just put a smoking gun into the game for the players to find, whether that’s an iron-clad confession or a photograph of the crime being committed or some other irrefutable proof. Ensuring it doesn’t get solved earlier is trickier.

The most satisfying mystery novels, for me, are the ones where I felt like I could have solved the case if I had just thought a little harder about it. I had all the pieces, I just never put them together the right way. Instead, larp organizers usually cheat. They withhold one or two key pieces of evidence, so there’s no risk any player can solve it before the organizers want them to. This isn’t inherently bad — The Secrets We Keep isn’t a larp about solving a mystery, it’s a larp about letting go of your childhood — but it does mean you should be clear with your players how it’s going to work. Saying “You don’t need to figure things out if you don’t want to, because the mystery will solve itself over time” is different from saying “You won’t have all the pieces, so don’t try too hard.” At the start of the game I didn’t necessarily expect we’d be able to solve the mystery, but there were so many journals and tape recordings and psychological profiles of suspects floating around it really felt like we were on the verge of putting everything together. So at the end, it was disappointing to find out we never were.²¹

Overall, though, it was a pretty great game, well-designed and well-organized. I’ve still got some quibbles with the plotting — there’s a pretty severe violation of Unity of Action that I find deeply dissatisfying — but that’s almost irrelevant to what the larp was trying to do. It’s operating on an emotional level, and was far more wistful than most larps I’ve played. For all the recovered memories and supernatural horror lurking through it, it’s really about coming to terms with what you’ve lost by growing up, and the melancholic realization that you had no choice.²²

Most larps deal with extreme situations: your life is in jeopardy, or your culture is imperiled, or the fate of humanity rests on the actions you’re going to take over the next few days. Those that don’t frequently involve fantastical elements: you’re all vampires, or wizards, or robots.²³ The Secrets We Keep is a reminder that most of the tragedies in our lives are the smallest — a loved one’s death, a friend’s betrayal — and they cut us just as deeply, if we let them.

Next: Stockholm (ARN) to Kraków (KRK)
Prev: Zürich to Milan

Footnotes

¹ A better traveler would flip through tour books months ahead of arrival to figure out what actually needs planning and what you can do on the spur of the moment. I virtually never do that. Most of the time it’s fine, but there are a lot of things — like The Last Supper or the Accademia Gallery with Michelangelo’s David here in Florence — where you should have booked a ticket weeks if not months ahead. It’s nice to get a chance to correct that on a subsequent trip.

² Wine’s a little too strong for the heat. With cocktails I generally stuck to the ones with strawberry juice or mango puree, although I made an exception for the occasional Americano.

³ Where among a lot of scientific instruments and some fascinating exhibits on globes and the evolution of telescopes you can find Galileo’s middle finger, preserved under glass. Long story.

⁴ When we bought tickets for Il Duomo on Monday the only reservation for the Dome tour available was the end of the day Tuesday, so that’s another one you’ll want to plan ahead for. It’s 463 steps up and I really dithered on whether I wanted to bother, but it’s worth it. The view is stunning — Florence doesn’t have any skyscrapers so you’ve got a clear view out over the city — and the climb takes you directly under the painted dome of the church so you get an incredible up-close view of the wild murals it’s painted with.

⁵ Home to Donatello’s David and a nice compact museum compared to the endless Uffizi Gallery.

⁶ The burial place of Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and Galileo (excepting Galileo’s middle finger).

⁷ There’s three copies of David scattered around the city — I wonder how many tourists leave thinking they’ve seen the original — so if you can’t get in to see the real one it’s not the end of the world. Still, there’s something breathtaking in seeing it up close and being able to walk around the whole thing that you just don’t get from the copies. I recommend making the effort.

⁸ Not that that’s a reliable mark of quality. But having seen a lot of Florence’s overhyped art up close, including Donatello’s Primavera and Birth of Venus, I can tell you that most of it absolutely deserves to be seen in person, if you happen to be nearby.

⁹ For obvious reasons

¹⁰ I don’t know if this is the hot vax summer we were all promised a year ago, or if COVID masking and restrictions will rush back in and ruin all our autumn and winter plans, but even given the frightening number of friends I’ve had test positive for some of the super-contagious variants now spreading and the decidedly anemic response from the authorities it looks like we’re just going to have to gut it out and hope for the best.

¹¹ Think Stranger Things and you’ve mostly got the vibe.

¹² i.e., Stephen King’s childhood.

¹³ In the actual game, the parts involving your childhood — the parts ostensibly set in the ’50s — are completely confined to the orphanage and further constrained by your being eight years old. Those scenes may have trafficked in nostalgia for childhood, but they were incredibly light on details which would have nailed them down to a time period.

¹⁴ Even more weirdly, the larp attracted an international crowd and people who grew up in the United States were a distinct minority. Were the ’80s really that universal, or is this another case where everyone’s nostalgic for the movie version? I suppose VCRs and tape recorders were ubiquitous.

¹⁵ In contrast, the acts in Inside Hamlet were used to set the themes you were intended to play on.

¹⁶ I still hate the term “meta-techniques.” It’s vaguely defined and usually comes out as covering everything you do as a player instead of a character in a game, which always seemed to me a pretty banal concept for such a fancy word.

¹⁷ This was handled very cleverly. It’s always felt a little awkward to me to be larping especially young children, performative rather than immersive, and Chaos League side-stepped the issue by having the scenes where you played your younger self play out entirely in the dark. Not being able to see each other is a time-honored trick for making people less self-conscious, and that let you ignore the physicality of the scene and just focus on the interactions.

¹⁸ Indeed, it’s possible to interpret events in such a way that Slitface was never real at all, except as a figment of overactive children’s imaginations (and adults all too susceptible to lapsing back into their childhood memories).

¹⁹ As most camp counselors can attest

²⁰ It’d be an odd mystery novel that wrapped up the murder in the first part of the book and spent the rest of the time on a travelogue of the Nile or a relaxing stay on a country estate.

²¹ And Then There Were None, the mystery larp I’m running in August, sidesteps the problem in part by not making solving the mystery the climax. Getting the answer early doesn’t break the game.

²² The final narration in Stand by Me: “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12. Jesus, does anyone?”

²³ Or even vampire wizard robots, knowing the larpers I roll with.