This year, Saint Valentine’s Day in Florence proved to be a day for a different kind of romance. Over 40,000 tram lovers crowded the streets to take their first ride on Florence’s new tram called Sirio. This was somewhat surprising because, since 2004 when work on the project began, the city and its citizens have been divided over the building of the tramway system into those who strongly support it and those who are dead against it. All have suffered the inconvenience, annoyance and endless traffic jams the construction work has caused. Yet, perhaps curious or attracted by a free ride (for a seven day period), people flocked to ride the 7.5 kilometer journey from near the central Santa Maria Novella Station to Scandicci, one of the city’s suburbs. Saturdays will, however, be a test of its real success when Scandicci’s famous weekly market is in full swing.

This is not Florence’s first tramway system. In fact, on April 5, 1879 the first horse-drawn tramway between Florence and Peretola was inaugurated. A year later it traveled as far as Prato and Poggio a Caiano. However, by 1926, the system had become obsolete and dilapidated and opened the way for the first buses to appear on the city’s streets. Its tribulations were multiplied when the company managing it went bankrupt and then when the tram lines were badly damaged during World War II. Although the lines were soon fully repaired, by 1958, the writing was on the wall and the old tramway ceased to exist.

Today, two other tram lines are projected, one linking Piazza Libertà in town to the Florence Airport at Perotola and another which will run from the Fortezza, near the main station to Careggi, Tuscany’s largest hospital complex. Whilst dogged by protests from critics who have managed, on cultural heritage grounds, to stop an earlier plan for the tram to run around the Cathedral,  perhaps a short ride on the elegant and very quiet Sirio may, at least, serve to placate some fears for the future.