Florence
Florence gave English fiction a setting for two very different books: Forster's A Room with a View, in which a young woman is kissed in a barley field and has to decide what it means, and George Eliot's Romola, which reconstructs the city under Savonarola with the patience of a historian.
The national library was founded in 1714 and its collections were damaged by the flood of 1966, an event that changed conservation practice across Europe. Its catalogue remains the best route into Florentine printing, and the city's archives are unusually rich for the period in which Romola is set.
A library to check
- Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze — catalogues and digital collections, open to readers online
Books connected to Florence
- A Room with a View — E. M. Forster, 1908. Forster's most generous comedy, and the best novel ever written about a pension in Florence.
- Romola — George Eliot, 1863. Eliot's historical novel: demanding, carefully researched and unlike anything else she wrote.
- The Portrait of a Lady — Henry James, 1881. The great novel about a woman's freedom being granted and then quietly withdrawn.
A note on accuracy
We describe literary connections and public collections, not street addresses, opening hours or ticket prices. Those change and we cannot verify them for every reader. Follow the institution's own site for current visiting information.