David Leavitt, Florence: A Delicate Case (Bloomsbury, 2002)

The non-fiction strain of this blog continues with the next book, a beautifully produced, enticingly slim number I bought I can’t even remember when, and have hauled around ever since intending to read.  David Leavitt, an American academic and writer of fiction who divides his time between Florence and Florida, contributed this book on the Tuscan city to a series which Bloomsbury published under the title “The Writer and the City”.  My own visits to Florence must have inspired me to buy it, and limited as my experience of the city is, Leavitt seems to me to have captured something essential when he writes about it as a place which plays host to thousands of visitors, drawn by its heavy freight of art and culture - fully a fifth of the world's stock, according to Leavitt - while concealing its real life behind closed doors.  The streets of Florence, as anyone who has been there will know, are strangely forbidding: tall, heavily rusticated walls keep the narrow alleys in perpetual shadow, hiding courtyards only glimpsed by chance as someone arrives or leaves through thick, iron-bolted doors.  Sparkling light, greenery, flowers, burbling fountains: all these are hidden away, not for the lowly tourist who spends hours queueing for his or her glimpse of the priceless works of art contained within the Uffizi or the Academia. 

Perhaps part of the attraction for Florence’s historically large ex-pat community was the challenge of penetrating this closed world, of becoming one of the elect observing the melee from the heights of Fiesole or Settignano, drinking tea at the invitation of a Countess.  This is the world on which Leavitt turns his gaze.  The book's title is taken from Henry James, who apparently described the city as "a delicate case", pointing to the strange fact that, as Leavitt notes, its most famous citizens, at least in the last 150 years, have all been foreigners who, in many cases, thought they knew better than the Florentines how to preserve their precious treasures.  Leavitt proceeds to regale us with a seamless flow of anecdotes about these various foreigners, each vignette the basis for a book in itself.  We move between well-known figures - E M Forster, staying with his mother at the Pensione which would become the model for the more famous one containing the room with the view; John Ruskin, bemoaning the erection of an omnibus stand by the bell tower in the Piazza della Signora - and more obscure ones.  Leavitt has a particular interest in Florence's appeal to gay men and women, recounting the exodus from London that took place at the end of the nineteenth century in the wake of the Labouchere Amendment and its dire consequences for Oscar Wilde.  Ironically, Labouchere himself ended up in Florence on his retirement, living "cheek by jowl" as neighbour to Lord Henry Somerset, who had fled London and his wife after she found him "in flagrante delicto with a teenage boy named Harry Smith".  The resulting scandal played out worse for the wife, Isabel, who made her discovery public and thus "flouted the Victorian code of 'reticence for women'", finding herself "persona non grata in English society".  In the more relaxed environment of Florence, Lord Henry, by contrast, set about enjoying his exile.

The art of Florence, of course, also features heavily.  There is a wonderful section on Michelangelo's David, which left me wondering once again how on earth Leavitt had uncovered all this stuff.  David's left arm, apparently, was broken off in 1527 when a riot broke out in front of the Palazzo Vecchio where he was on display.  The sculpture, having been moved shortly after its completion, was shifted once again in 1873, this time into its current home inside the Accademia.  Leavitt's descripton of David's progress through the streets of Florence in a cart running along specially constructed rails, is marvellous: "His famous posture - head turned, eyes glancing hesitantly over the left shoulder - takes on new pathos [...], as if what he is regarding with such worry is actually the gradual disappearance of the only home he has ever known".  The David now outside in the Piazza Signora is a replica, but even this has not been immune to mistreatment: a vandal broke off one of its toes in 1991.

Florence's artworks have suffered disaster several times, and Leavitt knows about them all.  The most moving account is of the great flood of November 1966, when the Arno burst its banks and muddy river water coursed through the city, reaching a height of six metres inside the Duomo.  The catalogue of what was lost is heartbreaking, but a light was shone into the horror by the generosity of hundreds of students and young people who came from all over the world to help repair the damage.  When Senator Edward Kennedy arrived in Florence to survey the scene, he found in the National Library "thousands of students up to their waists in water, working by candlelight", fishing the damaged books out of the water and passing them from hand to hand so they could have absorbent paper inserted between their leaves.   Who knows how much greater the loss would have been without the interventions of the volunteers, who became known as the "angeli del fango", or mud angels.  One young woman, of course, met her future husband in the line at the library, and never returned to the US.  In 1996 there was a 30th anniversary reunion in Florence for the mud angels, and another American woman, who had celebrated her twentieth birthday during the flood, returned for her fiftieth.

I'm sure that having visited Florence added a lot to my enjoyment of this book.  Nonetheless, I recommend it highly even if you haven't been to the city.  As an example of how to write this kind of book - an intelligent, lightly academic, amusing mixture of history and contemporary observation - it probably cannot be bettered.