This stunning hardcover collection brings alive the magnificent Italian city of Florence through the eyes of literary greats from Dante to Salman Rushdie.



In this gorgeously jacketed anthology of classic stories, an international array of brilliant writers provide windows onto the city's gilded past and full-blooded present. Florence's world-famous Renaissance is represented here by its most illustrious chroniclers, beginning with Dante's vision of an Inferno teeming with his Florentine enemies, Boccaccio's young Florentine nobles escaping the plague in The Decameron, and the artist Cellini's swashbuckling adventures. The city's long tradition of mesmerizing foreign visitors is celebrated in selections from Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad, E. M. Forster's A Room with a View, and the rapturous impressions of Stendhal (who gave his name to Stendhal syndrome). Mary McCarthy provides a vivid depiction of a twentieth-century market town; Penelope Fitzgerald weaves a gentle comedy of manners among Florence's fading aristocracy; Vasco Pratolini, one of the city's most renowned modern authors, tells a tender tale of class struggle under 1930s fascism; and Salman Rushdie dazzles with the magical realism of The Enchantress of Florence. George Eliot, Rainer Maria Rilke, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, Somerset Maugham, and Iris Origo are among the other brilliant writers whose stories illuminate facets of this fascinating city.