A Traveller's Companion to Florence Format: Paperback

Entertaining and hugely diverse views of the city of lagoons. The best-loved and most visited of Italian cities is vividly brought to life in the letters, diaries, and memoirs of travelers from past centuries and by the Florentines themselves. The extracts chosen by Harold Acton and Edward Chaney are as rich as the city itself in their variety and brilliance—here is Boccaccio on the Black Death; Vasari on the building of Giotto’s Campanile; an eyewitness account of the installation of Michelangelo’s David; the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning at the Casa Guidi; D.H. Lawrence and Dylan Thomas on twentieth-century Florentine society; and much more. This concise and lucid history of Florence from its early days, through its zenith as a prosperous city state that, under the Medici family, gave birth to the Renaissance, up to the Arno’s devastating flood in 1966, is accompanied by maps, engravings, and useful notes.

Edward Chaney taught at the University of Pisa for six years and was an associate at Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti in Florence while working on this book. His Warburg Institute Ph.D. on seventeenth-century travel in Italy was published as The Grand Tour and the Great Rebellion. His more recent books include The Evolution of the Grand Tour and an edition of Jones’s Roman Sketchbook. He is now professor of at the Southampton Institute. Sir Harold Acton (1904–94), a distinguished man of letters, historian, aesthete, novelist and poet, spent most of his life in Florence, the city that made him an honorary citizen in 1986. Among his best-known books are The Last Medici, Memoirs of an Aesthete, and The Bourbous of Naples. Also relevant are his Three Extraordinary Ambassadors and The Pazzi Conspiracy. He bequeathed the magnificent Florentine Villa la Pietra, in which he was born and died, to New York University to be used as an educational center for the arts.