Author(s): David Leavitt

Travel

Novelist David Leavitt joins Edmund White and Peter Carey in the acclaimed The Writer and the City series with a scintillating view of Italy's most adored city.
Florence is the only European city I can think of whose most famous citizens, at least in the last 150 years or so, have all been foreigners.' Thus David Leavitt writes in this lively account of expatriate life in the city of the lily. His narrative begins by asking why Florence has always proven to be such a popular destination for suicides, then moves into an analysis of what makes the city, in Henry James's words, such a 'delicate case.' Why, for instance, has Florence always drawn so many English and American visitors. (At the turn of the century, the Anglo-American population numbered more than 30,000.) Why have men and women fleeing sex scandal traditionally settled here? What about Florence has made it so fascinating; and so repellent - to artists and writers over the years?
Moving between present and past, Leavitt's narrative limns the history of the foreign colony from its origins in the middle of the nineteenth century until its demise under Mussolini, and considers the appeal of Florence to figures as diverse as Tchaikovsky, E. M. Forster, Ronald Firbank, Mary McCarthy, Mrs Keppel (mistress to King Edward VII) and Henry Labouchere, author of the Labouchere Amendment, under the provisions of which Oscar Wilde was convicted. Lesser-known episodes in Florentine history; the moving of Michelangelo's David, the construction of temporary bridges by battalions of black American soldiers in the wake of the Second World War, and the digging out of art treasures by 'mud angels' after the 1966 flood; are contrasted with images of Florence today (its vast pizza parlours and tourist culture) as well as analyses of the city's portrayal in such novels and films as A Room with a View, The Portrait of a Lady and Tea with Mussolini.
First published 2002