The most recommended books about Florence

A long time ago, when I was in hospital awaiting an operation, a fellow patient told me in times of trouble, you can’t go wrong with a Mills & Boon published book (Harlequin if you are in the US) to whisk you away. Wise advice, which I have used over and over again. And one of my go-to authors is Michelle Smart.

This book has everything I require for a complete escape – avrunaway bride, a resourceful heroine, and a broody hero who may not have loved the heroine to begin with but by the end is head over heels and a fabulous location as well.

This book allowed me some time to escape for a few hours on a bad day. It gave me the strength to carry on

This book takes you on a breathless journey with the Mona Lisa when it was hidden from the Germans during World War II.

It is set in interesting places and I loved the WW II tie-in. The author is an art historian—she holds a PhD in Art History from Yale University—so she knows what she’s talking about.

On a personal note, I had the privilege of interviewing her when she was our featured author for Roswell Reads, a one-city-one-read program and she gave an excellent presentation.

I’ve read a few of her other books and was equally impressed.

This book is key to understanding the “transmediation” of Dracula: the metamorphosis of Stoker’s story by adapting it for new media, such as theatrical and movie versions. As Bram Stoker died in 1911, his widow Florence played a key role in negotiating the rights for such modifications, and fighting the pirated screen version of Nosferatu created in Germany by Prana Film. As David Skal put it, Dracula is very much a story about control, and the subsequent developments show how Bram and then Florence tried to keep the lid on the unauthorized dissemination and adaptation of the Dracula novel—but failed in the end. Highly recommended reading for all who are interested in the question of how Dracula became so popular all over the world.

I loved this book because although I write children’s books, this is the sort of adult novel which feeds my imagination.

It begins in Florence at the end of WW2, where we first meet the British soldier Ulysses Temper, his commanding officer Darnley, and Evelyn Skinner, an elderly art historian. We then follow Ulysses back to the East end of London at the end of the war, where he resumes his old life – but changed by the experiences of war, Italy, and art.

We get to know his wonderfully varied group of friends who are bound together, and sometimes tortured, by nothing short of love - and we care about the perils and pleasures fate unexpectedly throws at them. The writing is magnificent, tender, expressive, and moving but never sentimental.

I absolutely love this book and cannot praise it highly enough.

I was once told; the best authors are the ones who read more than they write. To that end I don’t always stick with my favorite genres. This book was recommended to me by a friend as a sci-fi that I typically would not read because it’s also a romance book. Hey Alexa, is slightly in the future, when Amazon develops an evolved version of Alexa that exists in a beautiful female android. I don’t want to give any more away. What makes this book wonderful is the journey the two main characters take in discovering that love is as unique as each individual person and it can be found when we are open to it.  

The Monster of Florence is set in the famous Italian city of Florence (Firenze), as are all of Magdalen Nabb’s mysteries. She gives us fascinating insights into life in Florence, through the eyes of her detective, Marshall Guarnaccia. The Marshall is a very down-to-earth and believable character and does his best at trying to catch a serial killer on the loose in that part of Italy. The author takes the reader right inside life in Florence with a work that is entirely engaging and well-written.

I loved Ellen Raskin’s much-lauded The Westing Game when I was nine years old, but I never got around to reading her 1974 middle-grade book Figgs & Phantoms, until recently. It’s a weird and whimsical story about family and grief with a magical realist touch.

Once a month, Mona Lisa Newton stands on the shoulders of her diminutive Uncle Florence Figg and dons a cloak to form the “Figg-Newton giant” so they can reach the rare not-for-sale books on the top shelf of a local bookstore. Their family has its own private mythology, including a version of heaven called Capri, and when a death occurs, Mona is determined to follow the clues and find it.

The text and illustrations manifest Raskin’s wry sense of humor, though some of the book’s mature themes might be too much for younger readers.

This book, now more than twenty years old, is still a key work in the history of sexuality. Rocke explores masculine culture in Renaissance Florence, focusing on seemingly rampant homoeroticism. He explores the topic from both proscriptive sources (sermons, laws, etc.) and through criminal trials against men accused of sodomy (as the practice was called). Contrary to what we might expect, he finds that sodomy was a relatively tolerated aspect of male culture, so long as it followed acceptable patterns. As with so much else in Renaissance Italy, here too the Florentines looked to the ancients, essentially recreating the ancient Greek form of pederasty, in which older elite men formed sexual relationships with adolescents, taking the “active” role with their younger partners. None of this challenged their masculinity or precluded heterosexual marriage; this was something different. Rocke’s study thus challenges us to rethink early modern sexuality as a spectrum, rather… show more.

Buildings are a product of the artistic imagination and building technology, but they also depend on political will and cultural capital. Ross King, a skillful storyteller, describes how all these played a role in the construction of the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore in fifteenth-century Florence. Its maker, the great Filippo Brunelleschi, was the first architect in the modern sense, and in many ways the story of Western architecture begins here.

Pick up E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View and cue a Puccini aria. British author Forster wrote a lavishly romantic novel with a transgressive theme. Heroine Lucy Honeychurch struggles against her straitlaced Victorian background until a trip to Florence loosens her inhibitions. Does she marry her fiance, the arrogant Cecil Vyse or the Bohemian socialist George Emerson? Although the ending may be obvious, it is the vicarious trip through early 20th-century Tuscany—complete with a kiss in a field of violets—that is the delight.