Florence: A Traveller`s Reader

Product Description

Of all Italian cities, Florence has always had the strongest English accent: the Goncourt brothers in 1855 called it `ville tout anglaise`. Though that accent is diminished now, Florence remains for the English-speaking traveller what it always has been
- one of the best loved, & most visited, of cities. In this Traveller`s Reader, Florence`s rich & glorious past is brought vividly to life for the tourist of today through the medium of letters, diaries & memoirs of travellers to Florence from past centuries & of the Florentines themselves. The extracts chosen include: Boccaccio on the Black Death; Vasari on the building of Giotto`s Campanile; an eye-witness account of the installation of Michaelangelo`s ` David`; the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning at the Casa Guidi; & D. H. Lawrence & Dylan Thomas on twentieth-century Florentine society. Sir Harold Acton provides a concise history of the city from its origins, through its zenith as a prosperous city state which, under the Medici, gave birth to the Renaissance, & up to the Arno`s devastating flood in 1966. Sir Harold Acton, man of letters, historian, aesthete, novelist & poet, has spent most of his life in Florence. Among his best-known books is The Last Medici, Memoirs of an Aesthete.