This volume features a collection of letters, diaries and memoirs of travellers to Florence from past centuries and 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; and D.H. Lawrence and Dylan Thomas on 20th-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, and up to the Arno's devastating flood in 1966. Sir Harold Acton, man of letters, historian, aesthete, novelist and poet, has spent most of his life in Florence. Among his best-known books is "The Last Medici, Memoirs of an Aesthete".
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Review:
'It is the best conceivable companion guide to the city' - Country Life; 'It is hard to imagine a better way to begin to understand how Florence came to be what it is' - Spectator; 'precisely what it claims to be - a traveller's companion, idiosyncratic, gossipy, full of strange scraps of unlikely information... enjoyed equally by the armchair traveller... as it can be by the on-site tourist' - Irish Times; 'well worth reading'- Independent
About the Author:
Sir Harold Acton is a distinguished man of letters, historian, aesthete, novelist and poet, and has spent most of his life in Florence. Among his best-known books is The Last Medici, Memoirs of an Aesthete. Edward Chaney is Shuffrey Research Fellow in the history of architecture at Lincoln College, Oxford and has taught and lectured in Pisa and Florence.
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- PublisherInterlink Books
- Publication date2002
- ISBN 10 1566564662
- ISBN 13 9781566564663
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages368
- EditorChaney Edward
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