Entertaining and hugely diverse views of the city of lagoons. The best-loved and most visited of Italian cities is vividly brought to life in the letters, diaries, and memoirs of travelers from past centuries and by the Florentines themselves. The extracts chosen by Harold Acton and Edward Chaney are as rich as the city itself in their variety and brilliance—here is Boccaccio on the Black Death; Vasari on the building of Giotto’s Campanile; an eyewitness account of the installation of Michelangelo’s David; the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning at the Casa Guidi; D.H. Lawrence and Dylan Thomas on twentieth-century Florentine society; and much more. This concise and lucid history of Florence from its early days, through its zenith as a prosperous city state that, under the Medici family, gave birth to the Renaissance, up to the Arno’s devastating flood in 1966, is accompanied by maps, engravings, and useful notes.