Mediunic novels11/19/2023 ![]() A Tale of Poor Lovers by Vasco Pratolini Florence is not only the arena of the powerful but also a city of the people, and against its Renaissance splendour I would set the work of the great Florentine neorealist of the 20th century, Vasco Pratolini. Zumbo’s masterly plague pieces and gruesome wax dissections are still on display in the strange and marvellous museum of La Specola.Ĥ. Cleverly built around the great Sicilian master of anatomical waxes Gaetano Zumbo, summoned to the city to work, the narrative evokes the sinister magic of Renaissance Florence to perfection. Secrecy by Rupert Thomson Thomson’s novel is set at the tail-end of Medici dominance, in a Florence that has become the bloodstained, riotous playground of Cosimo III. The Folio Society’s edition has a deliciously patrician introduction by Harold Acton.ģ. With its vivid character sketches and gossipy detail of pageants, poisonings, art, sex and architecture, it adds depth and dimension to even the most casual stroll through the city. The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici by Christopher Hibbert The history of Florence is inextricable from the story of the ruthless, brilliant family that drove it to prominence and dominated its politics for 300 years, and Hibbert’s history is tremendous: informative, exciting and involving. Hugely enjoyable, ironic and darkly subversive – yet informed by all the beautiful order of Italian life, with Florence at its centre.Ģ. This is a great, fat, rich book, packed with stories of randy abbots, delinquent saints and adulterous wives. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio In a pandemic, it seems appropriate to begin with Boccaccio’s 100 tales told by quarantining Florentines, looking down on the city’s glory from the nearby town of Fiesole. Photograph: Dea Picture Library/De Agostini/Getty Imagesġ. The books I’ve chosen reflect just that dangerous, seductive chiaroscuro.Ī scene of the plague in Florence in 1348 described by Boccaccio, by Baldassarre Calamai (1787-1851). You don’t have to stay for long to see the intense drama of the city that plays out down every alley. On the ground, though, in the deep shadow of the narrow streets and austere, towering facades of the cradle of the Renaissance, there are immigrants who live six to a room behind secret doors, there are drug deals and knife fights and girls who go home with the wrong guy. (The sixth in my Florentine detective series, The Viper, is out now.) We were looking down on lovely Piazza Santa Croce, scene of a thousand years of bloody jousts and tournaments and the staggeringly violent Florentine football, Calcio Storico, and the words made perfect sense to me.įor the casual visitor, Italy is Tennyson’s “lands of summer” and Florence an elegant confection of galleries and architecture, of World Heritage sites and gelato. ![]() ‘Florence is a very noir city,” a film-maker once told me 10 years ago, on learning that I wrote thrillers set there.
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