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The Santo Spirito Projections

And my trips in
2007
&
2011

As with Venice there doesn't seem to be much native Italian fiction about Florence, or at least not much that's been translated into English. So most of the recommendations are written by Brits and Americans. The Renaissance, Medici intrigue, Machiavelli, the Pazzi Conspiracy, the lives of the artists, Simonetta Vespucci...the themes recur. The life of the artist's apprentice is also a pretty popular subject. Some science fiction novels too, strangely enough, dealing well with some fascinating what ifs surrounding the life of Leonardo. 

For novels written by a native, dealing with working class life in Florence between the wars, you might try Vasco Pratolini. I finally have.

This page now finally has its own off-topic page too, dealing with the Santo Spirito façade projections.

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
The Death of a Mafia Don
A Death in Calabria
The Black Rose of Florence 2012
Glanville, Brian Along the Arno
Cry of crickets
Kissing America
Griffin, John Florentine Madonna
Grindle, Lucretia The faces of angels
The Villa Triste
The Lost Daughter
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
David
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
A Time of Mourning reissued as The Drowning River
A fine and private place
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
Losowsky, Andrew The Doorbells of Florence
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

N-W
Nabb, Magdalen Death of an Englishman
Death of a Dutchman
Death in Springtime
Death in Autumn
The Marshall and the murderer
The Marshall and the madwoman
The Marshal's own case
The Marshal makes his report
The Marshal at the Villa Torrini
The Monster of Florence
Property of blood
Some bitter taste
The innocent
Vita Nuova
Orgill, Douglas Astrid factor
Palazzeschi, Aldo Materassi sisters
Pownall, David Hard frosts in Florence radio play
Pratolini, Vasco Bruno Santini
Family chronicle
The girls of San Frediano
An Italian story
Metello
Naked streets
A tale of poor lovers
Tale of Santa Croce
Proud, Linda  A tabernacle for the sun
Pallas and the Centaur
The Rebirth of Venus
Roessner, Michaela The stars Dispose
The stars compel
Rushdie, Salman The Enchantress of Florence
Ryan, Mary The promise
Schachner, N. Wanderer
Shulman, Sandra Francesca - the Florentine
Sinclair, Ian More and more
Slatton, Traci L. Immortal
Somerset Maugham, W. Up at the villa
Then and Now
Soren, Ingrid Meeting Dante
Spencer, Elizabeth The light in the piazza
Stewart, J.I.M. Avery's mission
Mark Lambert's supper
Stone, Irving The agony and the ecstasy
Swan, Michael The paradise garden
Tennant, Emma Felony
Timperley, Rosemary Mask shop
Townsend, Lindsay Voices in the Dark
Upton, Arvin Lorenzino
Van Orden, B. Water music
Vichi, Marco Death in August
Death and the Olive Grove January 2012
Vittorini, Elio The red carnation
Wallace, J. For the best of reasons

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. Republished in 2003 by Hesperus Press, publishers of  lost classics in lovable editions. 

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. (I didn't, but in 2011 A.N.Wilson's Dante in Love came along to ease one in, maybe.)





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 - art, the Medici, the plague, Plato, religious turmoil, homosexuality, fine fabrics, Savonarola, childbirth - it does its job well and with a few unpredictable twists. 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.   

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.

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 (see 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 Giuseppe, 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 intro animation 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 portrait 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 Jane, 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 all 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, when watching a TV documentary about the case, at discovering that he was, in fact, one of those taken in by the utterly foolish black magic theories. The film 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 pretty much a dishonest hindrance to the solving of the case.
More about the documentary here
He's written four more novels since, but I'm not tempted.

 

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.

Lucretia Grindle The Lost Daughter
This is the third novel in Lucretia Grindle's series of Florence-centred novels featuring detective Alessandro Pallioti. It deals with the disappearance of the daughter of some typically rich and dysfunctional American parents. She'd been doing a gap year art course in Florence and, it turns out, had also been being groomed on Facebook by an aging member of the Red Brigades, the notorious terrorist band who kidnapped prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978. The novel moves from Florence back to the childhood in Ferrara of the kidnapped girl's mother and on to the kidnapping itself. The past becomes the focus of the story, but the continued mystery about the girl's disappearance and fate keeps the tension up, even as events from Italy's history grip the attention. Florence is feelingly evoked, but doesn't feature for much of the length of the novel. But such geographical concerns pale beside the reader's appreciation of the ambitions of the plotting, the utterly believable characterisation, and the quality of the writing. I know I've said this before, but on unfortunately few occasions: when you finish this book you do so with the feeling that you've truly read something.  I really must read the others.

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.
 

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.




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.

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 Mary 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?

There are now five Stravaganza books, taking in alternative versions of Ravenna and Padua too, with a sixth due in 2012.
See www.stravaganza.co.uk for more info and other stuff to read and play with. 
See The Venice Questions too on this very site, for more about, Stravaganza and Mary H's Venice.

David
It's 1501 and Gabriele is a young stonecutter from out of town, come to Florence to find work and his brother the sculptor. Michelangelo is his milk - rather than blood - brother but is out of town. Gabriele is lucky enough to be taken in meantime by a wealthy widow who is happy to provide him with food and a warm bed, and who wants...very little in return. This little thing is provided warmly and willingly and, though not explicitly, this puts us quite swiftly into territory described on the back cover as Not suitable for younger readers. It's not surprising that the young man that modelled for Michelangelo's should be the object of more than the odd appreciative glance, and so it proves. His dalliances and modelling duties swiftly mix him dangerously well into Florence's complex network of political groupings and spying, beatings and denunciations ensue. There's art too, with wide-eyed visits to the Brancacci Chapel and San Marco. Later Leonardo turns up and things get really bitchy. All Renaissance life is here, then, seen from the point of view of a horny boy learning about life. And at the end of the book there is a real sense of life lived and lessons learned.
 

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.

A Time of Mourning
And here, with the introduction of her own detective, the author plunges properly into crime-series territory. The detective is called Sandro Cellini, and he's an ex-cop. But he's only just decided to become a private investigator, so this is his first job, or first two jobs. He's initially asked to look into the suicide of an elderly architect, whose wife cannot believe he'd do such a thing. Later he's drawn into the novel's other plot strand - the disappearance of a flirty art student, which her less worldly fellow-student flatmate spends a fair few chapters investigating before the girl's mother calls on Sandro. The strand with the searching student is enlivened by her learning some rather sudden life-lessons as she learns about her friend's life. There's also more of the girly and fashion stuff which I couldn't relate to in the Florentine Revenge and the reliance on cliffhanger chapter endings remains too. But only the need to eat and sleep stopped me reading this book, as it sweeps you in and along in effortless fashion - these are undoubtedly human beings here undergoing these life-churning events and you care what happens to them. The Florence it gives us is good and darkish and real, although the Santo Spirito/Boboli locations are not exactly fresh for Magdelen Nabb fans. But for the slightly grimier side of Florence and the dusty parkland where murders can happen where you gonna go? Lots of rain too, and a climactic flood of almost-biblical proportions which brings up all the 1966 stuff again.

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 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, all adding 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.

Andrew Losowsky
The Doorbells of Florence
To see this book is to want to take it home. It's a lovely little thing, full of photos of various doorbell plates in Florence with florid red hand-lettered headings giving the addresses. The cover too is hand-lettered and desirable.  The doorbells vary in class, decorativeness, and shine and in the state of their name labels. There's a story attached to each set of bell-pushes and these vary in length from a half-page to three or four pages. In the way of these things some tales make you smile. some make you frown, and some make a quick small impression. The stories are mostly what you might call quirky, and more often than not closely connected with doorbells, rather than just using the names on the labels, with an odd link which resolves itself at the end.  The cumulative effect is positive, impressive, and will leave you with some tales lodged away for next time you catch sight of odd doorbells whilst walking in Florence..

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 a man profiting muchly 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, who's 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.

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...

Vasco Pratolini A Tale of Poor Lovers
It's taken me a shamefully long time to get around to reading anything by this author. He's that rare thing - an actual Italian who wrote about Florence.  His works are set during the first half of the 20th Century - he's famous for writing about the resistance to fascism before and during WWII and the real working class people of Florence. Pardon me, then, for expecting a heavy and dry read, and not the very readable (almost-soapy) tapestry of real lives that the book serves up. It deals with the crimes, loves, hatreds, plots and shenanigans of various characters living in the Via del Corno, where Pratolini lived. Central are the guardian angels:  four young women born in the street whose fates help propel most of the plots. The supposed underlying subject is the brutal methods used by the fascists here, and in Italy as a whole. The book itself doesn't name a translator and some sources suggest it was Pratolini himself, with help from his wife and another writer. The book doesn't read like a translation at all, so a mighty fine job was done. It's also said that not all of the original novel was translated, and that some of the more pro-communist passages particularly were omitted. It's not until about half way that there's the full-on fascist night of violence - the 'action scenes'  as you can imagine in a film. This features a hairy motor-cycle chase around the city which ends with a dramatic death on the steps of San Lorenzo. Then things calm back down again to the more female concerns - ever-loving women and always-feckless men. The daily-life detail holds the attention, with festivals, fairs, food and smells and such all reeking of reality. But if it was an easier read than I'd expected I have to say it was also surprisingly less substantial than I was anticipating too. Not a masterpiece, but enjoyable and giving good Florence.

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, so named for the thread of the artist's life and works that runs through the series, not because the books are about him. Tommaso dei Maffei again narrates, but not solely this time. In the aftermath of the Pazzi conspiracy the Pope has excommunicated Florence and war is imminent. Lorenzo de Medici sends his wife and children out of Florence for their safety. He sends Angelo Poliziano with them to tutor his children, but his teaching lacks the blind piety required by their mother and conflict ensues, and it's all pretty symbolic. Meanwhile the life of Poliziano's sister Maria, who knows nothing of why she's been confined to a convent and thinks herself an orphan,  takes turns that will lead her to... This is again historical fiction of seemingly effortless authenticity, and again the concentration is on thinkers and the wisdom passed on by the written word rather than the more usual travails of the artists. There's a bit more up-front feminism this time too, although the low expectations of women at this time is a pretty much unavoidable theme. The Florentine locations are evocative, and concentrated in the west of the city - in the Palazzo Medici, of course, in Santa Trìnita and behind San Paolino, near Santa Maria Novella, where Botticelli lived. Another involving treat, then. Some may find the book too full of talk and lacking in action, but fine conversation and the discussion of weighty matters always beats the physical stuff in my book.

Marco Vichi
Death in August
The words 'odd' and 'eccentric' both have positive connotations in my book, and they both apply nicely to this one. It's the first in a series featuring Inspector Bordelli. There are more, but this is the first to be translated, from the Italian. So that's the first oddity - a crime novel set in Florence written by an actual native. The Inspector himself seems at first to be less than unusual: he's a cranky middle-aged bachelor, trying to give up smoking, and fantasising about women. But the people he meets and the conversations he has have a tendency to oddness and eccentricity that's refreshing, as are the flashes of humour. And as is par for the territory the book is more about the Inspector's life than police procedures. The setting is Florence in the 1960s because, the author has said, this allows him to drive a VW Beetle. Also the plots can thereby be mobile-phone free, and our hero's many reminiscences about the war are more  understandable. The locations are rarely gushingly or glowingly evoked, mostly we get just the address, but that's what you expect from a book written by a resident, I suppose. The writing (or maybe it's the translation) can get a bit clunky at times, but not often, and this detracts only minutely from a quirky and enjoyable tale.



Death and the Olive Grove
The second in the series is a good deal darker, as plots involving child murder can't help but be. One of Bordelli's crim friends, coincidentally also short in stature, has disappeared too. He had talked of a body up by Fiesole and some subsequent investigation had led to a dead doberman, which later disappeared. The 60s setting, the VW Beetle, the lip-smacking food and the quirkiness are all still strong, and our hero is still disgusted at his own smoking, but this does get more than a bit tedious. And smelly. Also on the downside there's some sloppy sexism, with all the young women being beautiful, with uniformly beautiful body parts, all the older women retaining their looks, and all the old women being annoying busybodies. Bordelli's best pal the tart-with-a-heart is in danger of becoming a bit of a doormat too, as she cooks for him at all hours and massages his shoulders while he tells her about his new, young (and beautiful, of course) conquest. The mood is depressed and rainy and tense, and Bordelli his still wracked by grim war memories. But the plot is full of enough twists and red herrings and surprise connections to keep us entertained and happily turning them pages. Also like the first book Florence is here the Florence of a resident, rather than a tourist - all around but not exactly lyrically described.

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 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 dislike less 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 degrees.

Niccolò Rinaldi Secret Florence
Having been most impressed with the London and Venice volumes in this series (and what with me being London-born and a pretty seasoned traveller to Venice I pride myself on having been a pretty harsh judge in both cases) hopes were high for this one. And they were not dashed. It's a fascinating guide to odd places and odd aspects of familiar places, and a source of explanations of the downright arcane.  It fulfils the role of readable armchair guide but also repays taking with you.  Being in the happy position of being able to test it by taking it to Florence I can report that it fulfils the purpose of prompting detours and also of answering questions like 'what is that?' I picked it up a few days into my trip and it hoovered up most of the puzzles from the previous few days. It identified a newly-restored tower, provided background to the damn stupid padlock-leaving phenomenon, and identified a weird new building visible on the horizon from San Miniato. There is something of a house style developing with this series, with the author here sharing the fascination displayed in the Venice volume with marked stones, odd statues, plaques and other mysterious and missable traces. And there's a refreshing freedom of any flinching from the scatological. No mention of the urinal set into the outside wall of a building (see photo left) in the Oltrano I spotted in the early 90s, though, but it may no longer be there.

 

Two screen caps from Amici miei






Three from The Girls of San Frediano


 

Obsession 1976
The director is Brian De Palma and the lead actor is Cliff Robertson, and I'll admit that I'm no fan of either of them. Here De Palma makes a very poor fist of making an Alfred Hitchcock film, and Robertson is no Cary Grant.  Stoney-faced Cliff plays a man whose wife and daughter are killed in a botched kidnap payoff. He builds a tomb looking like the church of San Miniato in Florence, where they first met, and after a decade and a half of obsessive mourning he revisits the city and the church and finds there a young woman who is the dead spit of, you guessed it, his wife, played by Genevieve Bujold. I'm betting that, bearing in mind the long gap of years, you've guessed who she is, but Robertson doesn't, and we're not supposed to. It's all credulity-stretching tosh. The photography has its moments (thanks to Vilmos Zsigmond), Florence is a handsome backdrop for about half an hour, Bernard Herrmann makes stormy music like he did for Hitchcock, and Ms Bujold can act. But as a Vertigo-influenced piece of filmic art it's laughable. It's also filmed through Vaseline-smeared lenses, for no reasonably explained reason. As far as location-spotting goes...upon entering San Miniato our hero is miraculously transported to another church. In the documentary amongst the extras on the Dutch DVD De Palma tells us that the Vatican would not allow filming there after a previous film crew given permission had made a porn film. So he was forced to film the interior in a church in what sounds like 'San Gemignato', which I presume means San Gimignano. The Piazza SS Annunziata makes a brief appearance, of course, and Ms Bujold's house doorway is in a picturesque buttressed-over street that I don't know in Florence.

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

The Plague in Florence Die Pest in Florenz 1919
Written by Fritz Lang, from an Edgar Allen Poe story. The IMDB says that it was only ever released in Finland.

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 from Obsession





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).





From September Affair


From Tea with Mussolini

A room with a view 1985
You might say that this was the only must-see film set in Florence, and I'd be hard pushed to disagree. A fresh young Helena Bonham-Carter gets accosted inside Santa Croce, traumatised in the Piazza della Signoria, and then her blood-stained postcards chucked into the Arno by the Englishman. Later there's a quick snog in a field that from then on progresses the plot and she eventually doesn't marry the man we knew she wouldn't. A fine and memorable cast, too, bordering on perfection. And it reminds you of a time when you never saw Simon Callow in a film and didn't see his bottom also. An odd thing though: the whole issue of them wanting a south-facing room is made mad by the fact that the room they get actually faces north over the Arno towards the Uffizi (see screen capture left) and HB-C also wakes up with the sun streaming across her bed from a crack in said window.

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, and a less-good cast, but feels more authentic and has a bit more wit and edge. Miss Lavish is much less pompous, the Emersons are much less posh and more Cockney, 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 with something to prove and a well-loved 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 pretty pointless to me.
 

September Affair 1950
An industrialist and a pianist (played by Joseph Cotten and Joan Fontaine) find love in Florence following an air crash in which they are presumed to have died. They meet in Rome and have snatched minutes in the ruins of Pompeii, the post-war rubble of Naples and romantic Capri before missing the plane and beginning their new lives in Florence. It's all very touristy, except it's in black and white, which rather depletes the spectacle of, say, the Blue Grotto in Capri. There's not a lot of location filming in Florence, but enough. Especially as it contains old cars and trams and a very grubby Duomo (see below left). The story is unusual and oddly convincing. Worth a watch.
 

The Stendhal Syndrome 1996 Dario Argento
Just discovered, review coming soon.

Tea with Mussolini 1999
A gang of old English women (Joan Plowright, Maggie Smith, Judi Dench...) living in Florence before World War II take under their wings a small boy born to the departed mistress of the feckless employer of one of them. 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 be interned in San Gimignano. (Oh, the suffering!) Add Cher as a brash rich 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 readily 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. The obligatory scene filmed in Piazza SS Annunziata here also feature a scene in one of the foundling hospital's cloisters (see left).
Update August 2011 - More than a decade later I rewatched, on DVD and in the midst of a reawakening of my Florence fever. Has age and time mellowed my opinion? Well, no: it's just as soapy and cringe making as I remember, with only Joan Plowright and Cher managing to put in performances that don't make you want to throw things at the screen.

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

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