‘Florence is a very noir city,” a film-maker once told me 10 years ago, on learning that I wrote thrillers set there. (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.
For 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. 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. You don’t have to stay for long to see the intense drama of the city that plays out down every alley. The books I’ve chosen reflect just that dangerous, seductive chiaroscuro.
1. 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. This is a great, fat, rich book, packed with stories of randy abbots, delinquent saints and adulterous wives. Hugely enjoyable, ironic and darkly subversive – yet informed by all the beautiful order of Italian life, with Florence at its centre.
2. 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. 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 Folio Society’s edition has a deliciously patrician introduction by Harold Acton.
3. 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. 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. Zumbo’s masterly plague pieces and gruesome wax dissections are still on display in the strange and marvellous museum of La Specola.
4. 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. Poor Lovers is set in the 20s, with fascism on the rise, among the sex workers, coal merchants and grocers of the grimy Via del Corno in the shadow of the Palazzo Vecchio, where the novelist and screenwriter lived. A Florentine to his fingertips – in his Cronaca Familiare, made into a film by Zurlini, the young Ferruccio on his deathbed in Rome longs to see the lights coming on along the Arno – Pratolini wrote both books while exiled in Naples.
5. Florence: A Delicate Case by David Leavitt
When I had a foreign correspondent live in Florence in my first novel, A Party in San Niccolo, I had to make excuses for him because the city is an odd little backwater for an ambitious journalist. In his wonderfully astute, waspish and concise commentary Leavitt, for some years a Tuscan resident, identifies this shady obscurity very nicely; the manner in which – attracting and rejecting – the city conceals itself from its foreign suitors: its haughtiness, its entitledness, its long slow grand decline. Indispensably enlightening.
6. The Monster of Florence by Magdalen Nabb
It is a coincidence that, although I had already written novels based in Florence, I only began my detective series shortly after the death of the brilliant Magdalen Nabb, whose Maresciallo Guarnaccia owned its mean streets. I’m not sure if I would have held my nerve had Florence still been Nabb’s turf. Her fascinating, meticulously researched books, set in one of the darkest periods in the city’s history – when a serial killer stalked the hills around it – are great, involving page-turners.
7. Hannibal by Thomas Harris
Harris’s might not be the first name to associate with Florence, but this sequel to The Silence of the Lambs opens with Hannibal Lecter prowling the narrow streets and holding court in the great dark rooms of the Palazzo Vecchio. For the breathlessly exciting first half of the novel, Harris makes the most intensely effective use of the city’s atmosphere, its arcades and shadows and seamy underbelly, and finds in the cradle of Machiavelli the perfect setting for a ruthlessly perverse intellectual.
8. A Room With a View by EM Forster
The violence that results when the new world (call it the Anglo-Saxon, or the rational, or the Puritan) comes hard up against the values and assumptions of the old, is a recurring drama in Florence, which has so long played host to other cultures. When the young, impressionable Lucy Honeychurch, heroine of EM Forster’s gloriously revelatory examination of this phenomenon, is jolted out of complacency by bearing witness to a shockingly casual murder in the Piazza Signoria, it is just as the world is being revealed to her as “suddenly full of beautiful things”. Her experience of this violent act is revealed as a portal, through which lies escape from repressive Edwardian England, to a full, rich life.
9. My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier
Written 50 years after Forster’s novel but set in much earlier times, Du Maurier tackles the same clash of sensibilities with very different preconceptions. The young Cornish narrator Philip Ashley – innocent of women, deeply suspicious of the exotic – visits Florence in search of his uncle Ambrose, who has fallen sick there after marrying the mysterious, alluring Rachel. Philip is there for a single day, yet the city’s influence hangs over every page, vivid and mesmerising: an arid, glittering place of diseased beauty and ancient corruption. Exposing Du Maurier’s vehement loathing of everything Florence represents – the labyrinthine, the enclosed, the secretive, the layered and the feminine – this novel is psychologically riveting to the last page.
10. Innocence by Penelope Fitzgerald
An exception to my rule, Fitzgerald’s Florentine excursion is the slow, enchanting love story between a communist doctor from the south and the shy daughter of eccentric nobility in the 50s. Stringing a tightrope between comedy and tragedy, Fitzgerald evokes Florence’s specific atmosphere: a combination of deep melancholy and a beauty that threatens to overwhelm. Mist and shadow are Fitzgerald’s colours, and diffidence is her mode, but the effect is to be absorbed and transported entirely into the city, and a place of the heart.
The Viper by Christobel Kent is published by Atlantic Books. To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com.
