There are many hundreds of
books about Florence and the Florentine Renaissance. Here are
some suggestions - you may find some of the old ones on your
bookshelves already.
Art
& Architecture
Kenneth Clark,
Civilisation,
London, 1969 (Chapter
4: 'Man - the Measure of All Things')
Baldassare
Castiglione, The
Book of the Courtier, 1528, trans. George
Bull, Penguin (Not Florentine,
but a key text in Renaissance thinking)
Niccolò
Machiavelli, The
Prince, 1513, first published 1532 (Written while
in exile from government after the return
of Medici rule. Still quite shocking in its
cool and semi-ironic dissection of the world
of politics.)
Jacob
Burckhardt, The
Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy,
1860
(Probably the single most influential book
on its subject, this study more or less invented
the idea of the 'Renaissance')
Walter Pater,
The
Renaissance, 1873 (Pater had to
suppress his famous 'Preface' to this book
of essays because it was thought to be too
inflammatory for young persons)
Iris Origo,
The
Merchant of Prato (Not specifically
about Florence (Prato is about twenty miles
to the north) but a famous and readable study
of an early Renaissance merchant and his life)
Christopher
Hibbert, Florence:
The Biography of a City, Penguin, 1993 (Lively and
interesting, but uneven in focus and too heavy
(1.25 kilos))
David Leavitt:
Florence,
A Delicate Case (2002) (Very precious,
but interesting on the nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century Anglo-Florentine community)
Frances Stonor
Saunders: Hawkwood:
Diabolical Englishman (2004) (Wide-ranging
life of this ruthless mercenary, whose equestrian
portrait by Uccello is in Florence's Cathedral)
Guide
Books and General Studies
Mary McCarthy:
The
Stones of Florence and Venice Observed
(1972) (I thought this
was out of print, but I see that it is available
through Amazon and presumably other bookshops
or public libraries. It's a long time since
I read this, but I remember it as a very informative
and lively book about the architecture and
history of Florence, and I'm looking forward
to reading it again)
The
Blue Guide to Florence (More 'serious'
than the Rough Guide, with more detail on
paintings and buildings)
Eve Borsook,
The
Companion Guide to Florence (Set out in the
form of 'walks' but very informative on history
and background)
Poetry
If you happen
to like nineteenth-century poetry then Elizabeth
Barrett Browning's 'Casa
Guidi Windows' and Robert Browning's poems
'Fra
Lippo Lippi' and 'Andrea
del Sarto' are all set in Florence. The
Brownings lived at Casa Guidi, near the Pitti
Palace from 1847 till Elizabeth's death in
1861. It can be visited, but not in winter
when it is available for rent from the Landmark
Trust.
Novels
George Eliot:
Romola
(1862-3) (This is by
no means as great a book as Middlemarch, but
it is set in fifteenth-century Florence during
the turbulent times of Savonarola, and shows
how the Victorians were fascinated by Renaissance
Italy. I confidently recommended this book
in 2002, having found it interesting as a
student, but when tried to reread it, I discovered
I now lacked the patience to persevere with
its turgid progress.)
E.M. Forster:
A
Room with a View (1908) (A novel about
how the experience of Italy affects a diverse
group of English tourists. The Merchant-Ivory
film is available as a video and is full of
good performances. Forster's Where Angels
Fear to Tread is set in Tuscany, and has also
been made into an agreeable film.)
Magdalen
Nabb, Death
of an Englishman, and many other titles (Like Donna
Leon's detective fiction about Venice, Nabb
uses Florence and the surrounding countryside
as the backdrop for murders, skulduggery and
mysteries, all duly solved by the tenacious
Marshal Guarnaccia. Good on atmosphere and
the heavy hand of history in Italian life.
)
Florence