Florence: A Portrait

In Dante, exiled from Florence in 1321, Levey finds an inspired guide to the city's thirteenth-century appearance, people, culture, and constitution, and a wrathful commentator on the politics that had fouled "l'ovil di San Giovanni", the "St. John's sheepfold" of his youth. Florence conjures this time of momentous activity, epitomized by the building of the Palazzo of the Priors, the crowning castle of the Palazzo Vecchio, whose tawny-yellow, crenelated tower trumpets Florence's colossal civic pride. Against the bloody background of struggles for power between Guelphs and Ghibellines, the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy, Levey shows us Florence nonetheless becoming a commercial power in which the crafts and guilds made way for the great Renaissance blossoming of la citta del fiore. He leads us from the medievalism of The Divine Comedy to the robust world of the Decameron, through plague and flood and fire to art triumphant in the buildings of Brunelleschi and the sculpture of Donatello. His book shows us Florence not just in its ascendancy and at its height, but also in its less familiar years and guises, from the sixteenth century through nineteenth, as limited democracy gave way to oligarchy, then autocracy, and the last strokes of decoration and decay created the city we know today.

Nestled in the Apennines, cradle of the Renaissance, home of Dante, Michelangelo, and the Medici, Florence is unlike any other city in its extraordinary mingling of great art and literature, natural splendor, and remarkable history. Intimate and grand, learned and engaging, Michael Levey's "Florence" renders the city in all of its madness and magnificence.