FLORENCE

Which?	A Room with a View by E.M. Forster (1908)
What?	Resplendent Italian Renaissance city where stifled passions break free

FLING WIDE the casement windows and the essence of the city floods in. Fresh morning air carries church bells and wingbeats, barrows clattering on cobbles, the river murmuring below. Sunlight hits the room’s red-tiled floor, dazzles the linen, nurtures the geraniums on the sill. Leaning out, the view unfurls: a Renaissance masterpiece of golden palazzi and terracotta rooftops, speared by towers and a huge, impossible dome. Behind that, green hills braid and fade into the distance. The romance is palpable. This is a ‘magic city’, the sort where one might do the most extraordinary things …

Florence is irresistible. In its 15th-century golden age, when it birthed the Italian Renaissance, the Tuscan city was artistically unmatched. Briefly, from 1865 to 1871, it was even capital of a newly unified Italy. As leisure travel became increasingly possible, well-heeled tourists flocked to appreciate its sights. Tourists just like Lucy Honeychurch, heroine of A Room with a View.

E.M. Forster wrote this sun-drenched romantic comedy in early 20th-century England, a place of stifling conventions for the upper-middle classes. The novel pokes a critical finger at the sterility and rigidity of Edwardian England. But it offers an antidote: Florence. The Italian city is all that England is not. Instead of structure, it is spontaneity; rather than pallor, it is passion; rather than niceness, it is life. Today’s Florence remains all of those things. The retreating Nazis destroyed the old bridges (except the famed Ponte Vecchio); the calamitous flood of 1966 ruined many buildings; the tourist throngs have become even more maddening. But this city – Unesco World Heritage-listed in its entirety – still has the power to enchant.

Naïve ingénue Lucy and her chaperone leave quiet Surrey for a very proper Italian trip, ticking off what the Baedeker guide prescribes. At the Pension Bertolini they are distraught at having rooms looking into a courtyard rather than over the Arno. Two Englishmen, who have river views, suggest a swap. And there begins Lucy’s coming of age, a struggle between her old-fashioned upbringing and a fiery new independence. After only days she’s witnessed a murder and had her first kiss. If England is vanilla, Florence is tutti frutti – all colours, all flavours.

You can’t stay at the fictional Pension Bertolini, nor the hotel that inspired it. In 1901 Forster stayed at Pension Simi, on the Arno’s north embankment, looking over the river to the cypresses of San Miniato and the Apennines’ foothills. Pension Simi no longer exists. And anyway, the outlook immortalised in the 1985 film of A Room with a View is from the Arno’s south bank, looking over the rooftops of the historic centre.

However, no matter where you stay, you can walk, as Lucy did. The frame of central Florence has changed little since the Renaissance. It’s the same compact jigsaw of narrow alleys lined with elegant palazzi, grand churches and medieval chapels. There are world-class art museums – the Uffizi, the Bargello – hung to the rafters with Titians, Botticcellis, Donatellos, Raphaels. Sculptures worthy of galleries can also be found scattered willy-nilly, lodging in loggia or guarding piazzas.

Just as Lucy does, you can turn right along the riverside Lungarno delle Grazie, past the Ponte alle Grazie bridge (the 1227 original now replaced by a post-war reconstruction) to take ‘a dear dirty back way’ to the church of Santa Croce. Lucy gets lost, drifting down streets, finding herself in the Piazza della Santissima Annunziata, admiring the cherub reliefs that decorate the Foundling Hospital: ‘she had never seen anything more beautiful’.

Finally she arrives before Santa Croce, with its ‘black-and-white facade of surpassing ugliness’. A matter of taste, perhaps. This striking neo-Gothic frontage is a 19th-century addition; the basilica was founded in the 13th century, and its vast, austere interior houses matchless frescoes by Giotto and other masters, as well as the tombs of Michelangelo and Machiavelli. There’s much to admire, and much satisfaction to be gained from appreciating the artworks deemed the finest – a bourgeois trait that Forster lampoons. But maybe, like Lucy, Santa Croce will leave you cold. Because arguably Florence is best not when studied but when felt.

Later, Lucy finds herself in the Piazza della Signoria, the city’s main square and long the centre of political life. Dominated by the Palazzo Vecchio, it’s a veritable outdoor museum; a replica of Michelangelo’s David stands where the original did, before it was moved to the nearby Galleria dell’Accademia. It’s in this piazza that Lucy witnesses a murder, faints onto George Emerson and sets her life on a new trajectory. Hopefully you won’t witness bloodshed, though Cellini’s statue of Perseus with the head of Medusa ensures a hint of the macabre.

You can also follow Forster’s English folk – by bus rather than horse and carriage – to Fiesole, a tiny hill town just northeast of the centre of Florence. This is where Florentines come to seek green space, where the views of the Arno Valley are spectacular and where, given a chance, you should do as George and Lucy did and sneak a kiss in a field of violets.

Florence is culturally magnificent, from the priceless art at street level to the tip of the Duomo’s cupola. But there’s also the Florence of the senses, the city that comes alive when you feel its hot sun on your skin. When you loiter over lunch, take a slow passeggiata in the cooling afternoon, watch a pink-orange sunset, sip a glass of good Chianti. When you stop questing for information but think of ‘nothing but the blue sky and the men and the women who live under it’.