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Informationen zum Autor ELLA CARR is an editor at Everyman's Library in the UK, and author of the guide Florence Walks . She has contributed to a number of travel and hotel guides, as well as to publications including The Oldie and Exberliner . Klappentext 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. Leseprobe PREFACE Henry James, one of the city’s most famous Anglo-American disciples, dubbed Florence ‘rounded pearl of cities – cheerful, compact, complete – full of a delicious mix of beauty and convenience.’ This notion of Florence as ‘complete’ gives us a sense of the city as seen through the rosy prism of its nineteenth- and early twentieth-century author-expats: as a slice of Renaissance splendour frozen in time for their leisure. This gentle vision of Florence is present in the accounts of James, Stendhal and D.H. Lawrence among others, for whom the city was raised up as a benign symbol of Western culture, awe-inspiring yet nevertheless ‘complete’ in its tidy perfection. Next to this vision competes another perspective entirely. Literary Florence as conjured by its indigenous writers is a far cry from the dewy raptures of its anglophone admirers. Vasco Pratolini’s autobiographical novella Family Chronicle is a beautiful meditation on filial relations and class struggle in Florence under the looming cloud of Fascism in the 1930s, against which the very beauty of the city – the definitive subject of expat accounts –becomes even more poignant as a backdrop to the everyday struggles of the Florentine poor. The great chronicler of Tuscan character, Curzio Malaparte, saw to the heart of what he called the region’s ‘infernal nature’, which has bestowed on its people since the time of Dante ‘an awareness of forbidden things’. To Malaparte, Florence was above all a city of ‘poetic madmen’ marked by their boundless conceit and ambition, an infernal hubris symbolized by the bloated and billowing dome at the centre of their Tuscan capital. In Those Cursed Tuscans Malaparte is especially scathing of the foreign ‘idiots’ who have encroached on Florence ever since Charles V first laid siege to the republic in 1530. This date is generally seen as a turning point in the city’s history, after which the surviving Medici heirs were brought in to rule as absolute monarchs. When the Medici line died out in 1737, Florence was handed over to the House of Lorraine and ruled as a vassal state of Austria until Italian Unification i...
