FictionalCities :: Florence

A-F
Alexander, Sidney Michelangelo the Florentine
Allen, Eric The man who chose death
The story of Lorenzo the Magnificent
Barbeau, Clayton C. Dante & Gentucca : a love story
Barber, Noel The daughters of the prince
Bennett, Laura Gilmour A time and a place
Boccaccio, Giovanni The decameron
Burns, Richard Sandro and Simonetta
Cherne, Barbara Bella Donna
Clark, Robert Dark water
Clewes, Howard Epitaph for love
Congreve, William Incognita
Cooper, Lettice Fenny
Daniels, Laura The Lakenham folly
Dann, Jack The Memory Cathedral
Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy
Day, Richard Cortez When in Florence
Delahaye, Michael Sale of lot 236
De Polnay, Peter Mario
Out of the square
Dibdin, Michael A rich full death
Dunant, Sarah The birth of Venus
Eliot, George Romola
Elston, Catherine Flight to Florence
Eyre, Annette The magnolia room
Eyre, Katherine Wigmore Amy
Ferro, Robert The blue star
Fisk, Alan Cupid and the silent goddess
Forster, E.M. A room with a view
Where angels fear to tread
Frank, Michael Florentine Commission
Freeman, Harold Webber The poor scholar's tale

G-M
Gaunt, Richard Medici woman
Gilbert, Michael The etruscan net
Giuttari, Michele A Florentine Death
A Death in Tuscany
Glanville, Brian Along the Arno
Cry of crickets
Kissing America
Griffin, John Florentine Madonna
Grindle, Lucretia Walsh The faces of angels
Harris, Thomas Hannibal
Hellenga, Robert The sixteen pleasures
The Italian Lover
Hill, John Spencer The last castrato: a mystery of Florence
Hines, Joanna Angels of the flood
Hoffman, Mary Stravaganza - City of Flowers
Holme, Timothy Vile Florentines
Huxley, Aldous Time must have a stop
James, Henry Portrait of a lady
The diary of a man of fifty (short story)
Kalogridis, Jeanne Painting Mona Lisa
King, Francis Henry The ant colony
Dividing stream
Kent, Christobel A party in San Niccolo
A Florentine revenge
Lamming, R.M. The notebook of Gismondo Cavalletti
Langton, Jane The Dante game
Leoni, Giulio The Third Heaven Conspiracy
(aka The Mosaic Crimes)
Lewis, Sinclair World so wide
Llorente, Pilar Molina The apprentice
Lloyd, Kathleen Phoenix in Firenze
Lorrimer, Claire Voice in the dark
McAuley, Paul J. Pasquale's angel
McKean, James Quattrocento
Machiavelli The Prince
Manetti, Antonio The fat woodworker
Marinello, Edward A. Lorenzo
Marshall-Andrews, Robert The palace of wisdom
Mathew, D. In Vallambrosa
Miller, Alison Demo

William Congreve Incognita This short novel, from the famous Restoration dramatist, was published in 1692 and is set in the Florence of the later Medici, so it's not written from quite such a distance as most of the novels here reviewed. Once you get past the florid and formal language you're into a plot concerning a couple of noblemen attending a masked ball and falling for two women, but each tells his object he is the other. If you know Shakespeare comedies you'll know how all this mistaken identity stuff goes. But the plot's not what we're here for. If you persevere you're rewarded by some witty writing and oddly memorable scenes, which just goes to show he should have stuck to plays, and he mostly did - this is his only novel. Recently republished by Hesperus Press, publishers of lost classics in lovable editions.		Jack Dann The Memory Cathedral A novel about a lost year in the life Leonardo da Vinci. What if Leonardo had got the chance to build his flying machines, and to take them East and use them in a war against the infidels. This adventure takes a while to get going, but as the preparatory half-novel takes place in a convincingly-painted Florence of the Medici, us Florence fans will want the preparations to go on forever. Leonardo's loves and intrigues are believable even when you know that the relationships are sometimes invented. The Medici, models and painters are all given lives and flesh, maybe not the ones they actually possessed but they are authentic enough to convince and enthral all but the driest pedant.
		Dante The Divine Comedy One of the real biggies in World literature, you really must try to read this, probably many times, in the hope that one day you'll manage more than a few pages. His mixed feelings for the city he loved, but from which he was exiled, are evident in passages in the Inferno and Purgatory. It's a notoriously brain-boggling job for any translator - it took until 1782 for anyone to try to render it into English. The best translation of the whole thing is said to be the one by Allen Mandelbaum, which I bought from a bookshop in Florence, to add extra incentive by association, but it didn't work, although I did read more than I had with any other version. There is a new translation of just The Inferno recently out (late 2004) by Ciaran Carson, which sounds temptingly fluid and unfussy and clear, so maybe I'll try again. Sarah Dunant The birth of Venus The story of a girl of good family in Renaissance Florence, who has more spirit than wiles and more intellect then beauty, and who wants to be an artist. A pale northerner arrives to fresco the family chapel and...well, I think you can guess what happens, but there's more. While this is a not unpredictable tale of a woman in conflict with the harsh constraints of her time and whilst all the bases are covered - the art, the Medici, the plague, Plato, religious turmoil, Savonarola, homosexuality, fine fabrics, childbirth - it does its job well and with a few unpredictable turns. With its melodramatic plot turns - and self-conscious mentions of famous faces - it never quite casts off a somewhat overwrought air of being upmarket chick-lit. But it's a fine authentic Florence fix of conviction and readability.

Alan Fisk Cupid and the silent goddess
Giuseppe is apprentice to mannerist painter Bronzino and also the model for two of the figures in his famous Allegory with Venus and Cupid. The painting (right) which is in the National Gallery in London is a beguiling and dense mix of figures and meanings that are far from certain. This novel tells the story of its commission and creation, with the main focus on the apprentice and his attachment to Angelina, the model who sits for Venus. She is a silent beauty whose smiles entrance but whose mind is a thing of mystery. Bronzino is seen through the eyes of Giusseppe, forced to be the object of his master's lusts when he is not slaking them with his own master Pontorno, and so he doesn't come out of this story well. He's painted as an evil-tempered and vain rapist of young boys, which is not the line Vasari takes, to say the least. The facts of history are played with, of course, but it's a believable tale which never jars or drags, and which is full of convincing inventions and fragrant details, like the mysterious Angelina responding positively to strong smells, whether pleasant or not. The plot is not complex, but there are well-drawn characters that you'll care for and the times are fully and colourfully evoked.
(And did you know that the foot in the lower-left-hand corner of the painting (right) is the Monty Python foot?)
With warm thanks to Alan Fisk for finding my site and sending me a copy of his mighty fine book.

Michele Giuttari A Florentine Death
Well, I tried, I really did. I managed to get past the flat and cliché-ridden prose, the unconvincing dialogue and the very ordinary characters. Also the fact that the lack of any descriptive talent was doing Florence no favours. I wasn't enjoying the book hugely but I was persevering, for your sake. But then on page 107 the cops recover a Velazquez painting and our hero is impressed by how its eyes follow him around the room. I'm sorry but, as has been said before and often, life is too short. Also a friend who managed to finish it had warned me that the lesbian character gets anally raped later on and enjoys it and that there's also some gratuitous Thomas Harris-style stuff, what with the gruesome torture implements and the man-eating wolves. If this sounds like the sort of thing that you'd enjoy then be my guest. But not in my house.
Much was made in the publicity material about Giuttari being involved in the Monster of Florence case, thereby making us feel we have to respect him for his real-life crime fighting. Imagine my joy then, watching a TV documentary about the case recently, at discovering that he was, in fact, one of those taken in by the utterly foolish black magic theories. The doc mentioned his criminal convictions for lying under oath too, and how he had a journalist arrested for pointing out his stupidity. It's somehow reassuring that my deep dislike for this book is born out by his turning out to be actually pretty much a dishonest hindrance to the solving of this case.
More about the documentary here

Brian Glanville Along the Arno
Three young exiles wash up in post-war Florence. The blurb talks of a lost generation and a web of love, violence and frustration... but I intend to read it one day, honest.

Thomas Harris Hannibal
The sequel to Silence of the Lambs sees the escaped Doctor Lecter establishing himself as an academic in Florence. With his wine expertise and love of the finest things he's like a dark-side James Bond, and the constant harping on his perfect refinement can get a little wearing. He displays the depth of his knowledge, and so gets to be the custodian of a grand palazzo - just like that - and we get shown some of the sights. The descriptions are loving, the detail convincing, and a corrupt policeman called Pazzi gets done in like his renaissance ancestor, as punishment for trying to help kill the bad Doctor. Florence's own serial killer, the Monster, as featured in Magdalen Nabb's novel, gets a look in too. For his final showdown with Clarice he has to leave Florence, and then the gruesomeness really begins. Engrossing. There is a film too.

Robert Hellenga
The sixteen pleasures
A book about a young American woman called Margot and her first time in Florence. She's come to help rescue the books damaged in the flood of 1966. It's a fragrant story of books, buildings, love and frescoes, and the effect the famous flood has on all of them. In a nutshell, 'swelling' seems to just about cover it.
(Also The fall of a sparrow: a truly affecting tale dealing with love, loss and the whole human thing. A classics lecturer learns to deal with the death of his daughter when a terrorist bomb in Bologna takes her life, and changes those of all of her family. Not Florence-related in the slightest, except a couple of mentions, but a very warm recommendation nonetheless.)
The Italian Lover
And then, 12 years after The Sixteen Pleasures, comes this sequel, in which the original book's heroine is approached by people wanting to make a film of the story told in that book, which in this book was written by her and published in 1975. (My sparse review above is because I wrote it in the first months of this site, and a few years after having read the book.) The action takes place in 1990 and Margot is now 53 and ready for a change. It may come from the film, or it may come in the form of a blues-guitar-playing classics professor whose daughter was killed in the Bologna train bombing. Plots and lives intertwine, with lots of authentic Italian and film-business detailing, and much criss-crossing of the streets of Florence. But it's the emotional involvement that keeps them pages turning - each character's trials and choices make you care about them and how their lives are going to develop. Like life, or a soap, but in a good way, a very good way.

John Spencer Hill The last castrato
The first chapters of this novel could once be found here - they got you past some off-putting purple passages and a couple of errors (like calling works by Leonardo da Vinci 'da Vincis', rather than 'Leonardos') and into the story. Hill's detective is another sensitive loner - an unmarried writer of poetry - but from unoriginal soil springs fresh life, with some believable and likeable characters and a sharp plot. There are clever but unobtrusive allusions that'll make you feel smart if you get them. You will know the identity of the murderer pretty early on, though, if you know anything about castrati, and putting the word castrato in the title also spoils what could've been a shocking revelation. The pacing works well by interspersing the murder stuff with the experiences of Cordelia - an American woman who's just dumped her unworthy husband to come to Florence to write her doctoral thesis and rediscover herself. She develops as the plot develops and her story is so perceptively written you might almost suspect Mr Hill of being a Ms.

Mary Hoffman
Stravaganza - City of Flowers
The first book in the Stravaganza series City of Masks was set in Venice and I loved it. I haven't read the second one, set in Siena, but got this sent to me as an advance uncorrected proof (my first!) to review, after Ms H herself made contact. It has characters from the previous two books, and new ones, hopping back and forth from Renaissance Florence to 21st Century North London.
The plot hangs upon the impending marriage of various members of the fictionalised Medici family and the trouble expected, in the Pazzi conspiracy vein. Florence is very well evoked, fictionalised or not, with some nice changes - like Michelangelo being female - and other 'in-joke' touches for us fans to spot. And the flood towards the end is a scene not soon forgotten. I enjoyed this book but found it less emotionally engaging and more romantic and, if you'll pardon the expression, girly than the first one. (If I had a pound for every time someone blushed...I'd have more than twenty pounds, I imagine. ) But I'm no teenager, and not a girl, and so maybe I'm not this book's target audience. That's not to say there's not plenty to give pleasure to Florence fans here, and it still has the sharpness and humanity I enjoyed in the first one and so gets a warm recommendation. And which of us can say we wouldn't be better people if we were more in touch with a our inner (teenage) woman?

Henry James
The diary of a man of fifty
A short story in which a man (of fifty) returns to Florence, from which city he fled twenty-five years before, from a relationship with an alluring woman that would, he thinks, have only made him miserable had he remained. He meets a young man in a similar situation, but the woman is the daughter of his long-dead lost love. Old ground is gone over, new facts emerge, and history fails to repeat itself, maybe. A subtle and complex little tale, which subtly whiffs of Florence, without too much sight-seeing.

Christobel Kent
A party in San Niccolo
Well, after a pretty lean period for new novels set in Florence comes a real gem. There's a murder, or two, but this is not really a crime novel. It's more a book of characters and the way their lives connect, which is a major theme in crime novels, of course, but the story here isn't of police and procedure. The main character is Gina, an Englishwoman who's finding motherhood a little limiting, to say the least, and escapes to stay in Florence at the austere home of an old school friend and her austere and disturbing architect husband. The first murder victim is a friend of her hosts' daughter. As Gina socialises and shops and goes to stay in the country the death and the subsequent investigation intrudes on, and affects, the lives of the people she meets in different ways, and these people in turn meet others... The young people contemplate their messy lives as the old people look back at their messy pasts. As the week progresses, the plot thickens as preparations are made for the party of the title (uncannily echoing the plot of Mrs Dalloway which I read just before this book.) Florence and its tacky high life and lurid low life are described and evoked with telling detail and conviction, and the characters convince and breathe. An exceptionally good book.

A Florentine revenge
And there's no dip in quality here, just an impressive shift of territory. This one slips effortlessly over into crime-novel concerns, with the murder of a man suspected of murdering a child years earlier keeping pace with the initially seemingly disconnected lives and clients of a British tour guide and a woman working in a swanky frock shop. It was often a bit over-girly for me, to be honest - lot's of lingering descriptions of posh frocks and shoes, and the appearance and glamour of the female characters generally, especially the rich man's wife, whose smallness and cuteness is emphasized every time she appears. There's also an an annoying reliance on cliff-hanger switches between the different characters' stories, with these tense hands-around-throat moments too often turning out to be red herrings. But these are small criticisms of a novel whose converging strands drag you in, and Florence is - cliché alert! - a character in itself here, so lovingly are it's glowing art and gloomy streets evoked. The dark and smelly underbelly of the city is just as well evoked as the shiny and tourist-infested surface. Truly a Florentine and narrative treat.

Jane Langton The Dante game
This starts off a little florid in the writing department, but the style settles down as the plot kicks in. It's an old-fashioned, but good, read with good older characters and mostly feckless younger ones, and a heroine of somewhat overdone traffic-stopping beauty. Homer Kelly is Ms Langton's 'hero' - I put him in inverted commas because he does very little except gradually come around to believing the emotionally involved character's conviction that there's bad stuff afoot and he gets to talk to the police quite a bit, for no readily apparent reason. But I liked it: Florence glows from the pages, the plot twists involvingly, and Dante's Divine Comedy is woven into the plot nicely and enlighteningly. The author provides us with some very nice view sketches too.

Giulio Leoni
The Third Heaven Conspiracy
(aka The Mosaic Crimes)
A rarity in at least four ways, this book is set in Florence, before the Renaissance, is written by an Italian and features Dante as a detective. Our pompous hero/poet is charged with solving the nasty murder of a mosaicist in a ruined church just outside Florence, a church with a gaping pit where the nave should be. His investigation takes him all around medieval Florence and takes in secret societies, papal intrigue, corruption and heresy. There's catacombs, flashes of female flesh, dark deeds and violence too, to add more than a little gothic spice. You might initially think it Da Vinci Code-inspired, but it was published in Italian in 2004, before most of the fuss, if not all of it. The translation preserves the superiority of the writing here, as well as it's unbreathless pacing and maturity. The cover will remind you of An Instance of the Fingerpost, with Iain Pears' book also being a closer comparison in ambition. References and resonances abound, in amongst much philosophical, mystical and theological discussion, and even a couple of in-jokes. I felt undrawn to Dante, and a little underwhelmed by the somewhat undramatic ending, but it's an enthralling and wordy ride while it lasts.

Pilar Molina Llorente
The apprentice
A children's book, telling of a 13 year old apprentice painter and his discovery of a terrible secret in the attic.

Paul J. McAuley
Pasquale's angel
What if...Leonardo's machines worked and had been put into production, so that the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution happen at the same time. A murder leads Pasquale - a young painter, of course - into dark plots and the trail leads to the man himself. Good strange stuff.

Magdalen Nabb

The Monster of Florence
Marshal Guarnaccia is placed on a team digging up an old serial killer case, but his appointment seems more political than practical. This is a departure for Ms Nabb, being based on a true case (also touched on in Hannibal above) and brain-boilingly convoluted. The 1oth in the Marshal series but, like the best car tyres, the old gripping power is still there.

The Marshal's own case
It'd been such a while since The Monster of Florence, I read an old one to keep her name fresh on the site. It begins with the Marshal suffering some hot and crowded shopping for the new term's supplies with his wife and kids. The concern with children continues, with the worried mother of a missing son - in his 40s admittedly - and more stuff about the Marshal's two. But then the dismembered corpse of a what appears to be a young woman turns up and we're plunged into the world of Florence's transsexual prostitutes. We learn, as the Marshal learns, about the vicissitudes, and downright dangers, of their lifestyle, and very educational it is too. The humanity shines through, with believable emotions and characters.

Property of blood Soho Crime 2001
After a gap of 5 years comes the new Marshal novel. It seems that Collins, Ms Nabb's UK publisher, got so fed up with the wait that they dropped her, and so it has fallen to a US publisher to bring this one out. With so much pap published in the UK this seems, well, criminal. The fact that the publishing details in the book say that the book was first published in Germany in 1999 is a mite confusing too. The book opens with the first-hand testimony of of a kidnap victim, which is full of more than you ever knew about the techniques and small bits of business involved in the business of kidnapping. We then meet the family of the poor woman, who is not as rich as they think, and we begin to doubt for the life expectancy of anyone relying on this lot. Except we're reading her account of her ordeal so she must make it, you think. There's less of the Marshal's own domestic life this time, although the family is still a big theme. It follows the last, The Monster of Florence in being a bit harsher than the Marshal books used to be, but the characters and details and grip are all still there.
And in 2004 - three years later - this book was finally published in the UK by Heinemann in paperback, along with the hardback of Some bitter taste and reissues of the earlier novels after years out of print.

Some bitter taste Soho Crime 2002
There's a return to smaller scale domestic crime in this one. It's August and it's broiling out on the streets of Florence, again. The Marshal is visited by a woman who thinks someone's been in her flat, and he visits an elderly wealthy Englishman who's final days seem wrapped in a strange sadness. Then there are the Albanian prostitutes. All these strands and themes connect in ways sometimes subtle and rarely obvious. But the Marshal's as grumpy and self-doubting as ever, and the whole thing is just so real - with no pat answers and no trite happy ending.

The innocent Soho Crime 2005
Returning to the familiar Florence of Ms Nabb’s Marshal, especially after a three year gap, is like relaxing into a good warm bath, except when the bath turns out to be a hyacinth-choked pond in the Boboli Gardens with a woman’s body in it. Gruesome death in a familiar setting being even more disturbing than in strange locations of course. Having the crime committed in the Boboli and the suspects amongst the residents of the Oltrano district also makes this an even less geographically varied affair than usual. But the themes are the familiar ones of family and guilt and greed, with the Marshall’s family both a refuge from and reflection of the larger concerns. And there are excursions to Rome, even if we only hear about them afterwards. The author has dabbled with serial killers recently and here she taps into the scary watery imagery of recent Japanese horror films, with an especially spooky dream sequence full of such scenes. As undisappointing as ever.

Vita Nuova Soho Crime 2008
It's sad to be reviewing the final Marshal book, but I'm happy to say it's a real gripper. The plot concerns sex workers from Eastern Europe and begins with the murder of the daughter of the man profiting from their misery. With the help of a journalist the Marshal learns much, and experiences more than he'd like. As things get murkier the Marshal's emotional state dominates the story, as he tries to cope with it all without his wife, away on family business. There's a lot of stress on the mental states and, indeed, illnesses of the characters, and illness generally is here all around. This is as near as I get to a one-sitting read, with the opening (learning) third of the book followed by the compulsion of the Marshal's misery in the middle third and then the operation that brings things to an end. Not a happy end, of course, but a memorable one, of course.

Linda Proud

A tabernacle for the sun
Another fine novel dealing with the Florence of the Medici, this time from the perspective of Tommaso dei Maffei, a young apprentice scribe of possibly noble birth. He idolises Lorenzo de Medici and yearns for Florence, until his home town of Volterra becomes a pawn of politicking between Florence and Rome. His feelings following the massacre evolve as he is passed from one mentor figure to another, until he joins the Medici circle. His emotional, intellectual and spiritual development take us through a procession of famous people and events with a freshness and perception that sees off any tendency towards mere name-droppery. There's a deal of discussion of philosophy here, but you come away feeling enlightened rather than bludgeoned. The consistent nature of harmony and pleasing proportion, from painting through architecture to music is a common and convincing theme. Leonardo's being anonymously accused of buggery and The Pazzi Conspiracy get a run through again - the writing of the latter leaving it more vividly in your mind than any factual account could, of course. Thinkers this time get a bit more of a look in, but painters dominate, through their familiarity if nothing else, and Simonetta Vespucci glows once more. Another treat for fans of Florence in the 1400s, and a book with that indefinable numinous something.

Pallas and the Centaur
This is the middle volume of the Botticelli Trilogy, which I've not read yet.

The Rebirth of Venus
This volume opens with Tommaso de' Maffei living in London in 1505. He's now in his forties, working as a tutor and mixing with the minds gathered around John Colet, the Dean of St Paul's. His journal of life in London and his return journey to Italy is interspersed with the story of his life in Florence after the Pazzi Conspiracy 20 years earlier. This period takes in the rise of Savonarola and Lorenzo il Magnifico's decline, much turmoil, and deaths natural and unnatural; as well as lots of philosophical conflict and fervent discussion. As before it's good to see the rebirth of classical philosophy that was so central to the renaissance actually getting the airing it deserves, and not just as concepts dropped in to spice up more common tales of the lives and dirty-laundry of the artists and the Medici. We do meet Michelangelo and Botticelli and the gang, but again in a natural passing way. I don't know if Botticelli's personal hygiene habits actually were such that a friend might push him in the Arno to clean him up, but I believe it now. This book provides a long and deep immersion in the Florentine renaissance that very few other novels provide. The emotional lives of our narrator and the other characters mostly take second place to their intellectual development, but lives are also touchingly lived and we believe in them all. Emotions take greater prominence towards the end, though, with both time-scale's stories involving visits to Venice which are short but piquant. The earlier visit features a cameo by Giorgione and in the later one Tommaso manages something of a cure for his melancholy, with the help of Bellini's San Zaccaria Altarpiece (which sounds convincing to me) and in the company of Dürer. 'Like being there' is a cliché often used but very rarely deserved. Linda Proud's ability to succeed in living up to this phrase is almost spooky. This is a special book.

Amici miei 1975
For Brits I can best sum this up as Last of the Summer Wine set in, and around, Florence. For the rest of you I'll need to say it's all about a bunch of no-longer-young male buddies behaving like children. Mostly this involves playing practical jokes on people. There's more sex and swearing here than in
L of the SW, and the women are younger and sexier, but the concept is the same, only without the laughs, for me anyway. This film has a certain reputation but I found it unfunny, dated and unmoving. Philipp Noiret is in it, as is Adolfo Celi in an uncharacteristic unvillainous part, at least if you only know him as a Bond villain and maybe in Who saw her die? over on the Venice films page. The flashes of Florence are few but very real and very wintery. There's some action in Piazza SS Annunziata and a funeral leaves Santo Spirito (both scenes captured right.). This was never released in the UK and it's evidently only available on DVD in Brazil and Greece. There are two sequels.

Family chronicle 1962
Based upon the most autobiographical of Pratolini's novels of working class life in Florence before World War II, this was directed by Valerio Zurlini and stars Marcello Mastroianni. And I sincerely hope to get to see it one day.

Hannibal 2001
To concentrate on the presence of Florence in this film in the light of all the other famous factors may seem a little odd, but I probably wouldn't have bought the DVD of this, what with the mixed reviews and all, if it wasn't for the Flo factor, and that's what this page is all about, after all. And Florence does look handsome, it must be said, as does Julianne Moore. She's a mighty fine actress, but played some pretty unlovable characters around this time, in the likes of The Hudsucker Proxy and Cookie's Fortune. She's not at all unlovable in this one. What is unlovable is the famous nasty ending, which is not nasty in the film, just laughably daft. The rest of it chugs along quite nicely in a way which keeps you quite gripped but leaves no lasting impression. Effective, with good locations - the library where Hannibal works is, in fact, the famous Foundling Hospital - but not a great film.

The Marshal 1993
This was on UK television many years back, with Alfred Molina making a fine stab at Ms Nabb's Marshal, with Gemma Craven as his wife and Jude Law was in it too. Filmed on the Marshal's fictional patch around the Oltrano district, it is said that the author hated it and blocked any rebroadcasting. I watched it and enjoyed it but failed to keep the VHS recording, foolish boy.

Obsession 1976
Reviews say that this Brian De Palma film sees Cliff Robertson visiting Italy after the death of his wife, and whilst there meeting a woman who looks a lot like her, and even more like Genevieve Bujold. Florence is sometimes mentioned too, and San Miniato church.

Paisa 1946
A grimly realistic portmanteau war film directed by Roberto Rossellini and featuring episodes set in Florence, I'm told.

The Portrait of a Lady 1996
Nicole Kidman plays another of Henry James's American women of means bouncing around Europe and turning down offers of marriage, until she meets the wrong man, played by John Malkovich. It's all very intense and modern, and the scenes in Florence amount to two brief views - a carriage passes the Duomo and someone walks through the Piazza SS Annunziata carpeted in cabbage leaves.

Two screen caps from Amici miei

Two from The Portrait of a Lady

		Romola 1924 Lilian and Dorothy Gish, along with William Powell and Ronald Colman, starred in this silent adaptation of the George Eliot novel. Filmed in Florence this is reputedly slow and a bit of a stinker, redeemed only by its photography. Not available on DVD yet, but you can watch a rare, dark and strange clip on YouTube below.
Two Screen captures from A room with a view (1985).		A room with a view 1985 In which Helena Bonham-Carter experiences raw emotion in Tuscany. Well she sees loud Italians shouting and fighting and then gets snogged in a field, if only by an Englishman. It's a rare and tasteful Florence-fix on film, probably the best film set there so far, and therefore to be treasured. HB-C gets traumatised in the Piazza della Signoria, accosted inside Santa Croce, her blood-stained postcards chucked into the Arno by the Uffizi by the Englishman, and then there's the view from that room... A room with a view 2007 A new UK ITV adaptation by Andrew Davies. It has less of the glow and swoon of the Merchant/Ivory film above, but feels more authentic and has more wit and edge. More is made of the class difference and the Emerson's rough working-class background, and the odd bits of gay subtext are a bit more obvious too. Generally the sort of differences you'd expect between a smart Noughties TV adaptation and a romantic 80s nostalgia-fest. Florence looks fine, but without the warming-up filters of the film. And jarring liberties are taken with the ending, I warn you, which seemed a little pointless to me. September Affair 1950 Joseph Cotten and Joan Fontaine find love in Florence following an air crash in which they are presumed to have died. Tea with Mussolini 1999 A gang of old women (Maggie Smith, Joan Plowright...) living in Florence before World War II take under their wings a boy born to the departed mistress of the employer of one of the gang. He gets sent away, and then he comes back, and then he comes to their aid when their faith in the decency of Mussolini proves unfounded and they get shipped off to San Gimignano. (Oh, the suffering!) Add Cher as a brash American who the Brits think is insufferably vulgar but who, of course, helps them all in their hour of need. And Lily Tomlin as a lesbian, for no apparent reason. Stir them all up with large dollops of cliché, sentimentality, a strong rose tint and some embarrassing dialogue and you get a film to avoid. Except for the fact that there's lots of Florence, which is rare in films, as you can see from this short list, and which may make you willing to stomach the rest of the package.
La Viaccia (The Lovemakers) 1961 Stars a young Claudia Cardinale and Jean Paul Belmondo. The Italian title is the name of a farm, control of which is central to the plot, as our hero ducks out of his responsibility to become prostitute CC's lover and protector. Written by Vasco Pratolini from a novel by Mario Pratesi. The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles Florence, May 1908 1993 This is the second part of The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones, Chapter 3: The Perils of Cupid. In the first half Vienna, November 1908 young Indiana (or Henry as he was known then) falls droopily in love with a young princess, which is all a bit drippy and creepy as he's 8 years old. He also gets a dinner-table lecture on love and sex by Sigmund Freud which ratchets the creep-o-meter up even more. After this heartbreaking episode the family decamp to Florence, where Henry's Mum has a thing with Puccini. The composer would've been around fifty in 1908, but is very vigorous here. It's all a bit self-consciously educational, with much talk of Galileo and physics and wallowing in the opera. But at one stage a character points out that Florence is 'the cradle of art' which is hard to argue with, or indeed understand. The overall tone is best described as middle-brow with pretensions. Florence looks very pretty, though, including scenes in the graveyard and church of San Miniato, the Boboli Gardens and a brief glimpse of the old standby Piazza SS Annunziata. Entertaining enough if you're not expecting too much.		Two from The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles

David Pownall Hard frosts in Florence This is a radio play, a monologue written specially for Paul Schofield and was rebroadcast on Radio 4 on the 9th April 2008 as a tribute to him. A troubled Michelangelo returns to Florence for the last time to see his statue of David...

Lisa McGarry The Piazzas of Florence This is undoubtedly a more-than-usually attractive little book. The cover is a a lovely textured sandy/terracotta-coloured thing and the printing is high quality with some very tasteful maroon detailing. Add to this a foldout watercolour map for each piazza, and a ribbon bookmark in another fine rich terracotta shade, and you have more than enough visual appeal to make you pick the book up. Thankfully there's also more than enough substance in the text too to stop you putting it down. Taking each of Florence's piazzas in turn the author then gets to hang stories, observations and history around each one. So the Piazza de' Pitti features plenty of details about Ms McGarry's life, this being where she lives, as well as plenty about the Pitti Palace, the Boboli Gardens, and the area's famous residents. Similarly the Arno gets dealt with when she writes about the piazzetta in the middle of the Ponte Vecchio and the Medici when she writes about Piazza San Lorenzo. The mix of history, local knowledge, architectural notes and personal-life details make for a warm and winning mixture and an easy read. Small ointment-flies for me are the boring printed annotations on the maps - the type not the text - which somewhat spoil their watercolouriness, and the fact that she doesn't include my favourite piazza - Santissima Annunziata - although it does get a page in the Piazza San Marco chapter. But against this must be placed the burning desire to visit Florence again that reading the book stokes up, and the fact that it's made me almost not hate the characterless Piazza della Repubblica. And she knows her gelato too. All in all an attractive, characterful and thoughtful introduction (or refresher) for Florence fans of all levels.