Seeking to get to up to speed on all things Firenze, I recently finished Stephanie Storey’s historical fiction novel, Oil and Marble. It covers the years 1499 – 1503 when both Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti lived in Florence and were artistic rivals of sorts. It was an entertaining way to re-learn about this period, but I had to wonder about the mix of history to fiction. As I read, I toggled quite a bit to fact check from other resources and concluded that Storey did a fine job of being true to the actual historical framework. As with shows like The Crown, the fiction comes in in how she imagines the characters’ day-to-day activities, dialogue, and motivations, which she did to great effect. I also toggled a lot to google maps so I could visualize where various events took place. I still can’t get over the fact that people today traipse around on the same streets and in the same piazze as da Vinci and Buonarroti (and Dante and Botticelli and Raphael and so ma...
It’s been years, nay decades, since I’ve read a novel from the English literary canon but when I researched “books set in Florence,” E.M. Forster’s A Room With A View topped the search results. I hesitated, however, thinking I had read something of Forster’s while in college—something I recalled as dismal, filled with doom and gloom. Later I realized it was Thomas Hardy I was remembering, specifically, Jude the Obscure , a relentlessly depressing story if ever there was one and the antithesis of a 19/20 th century comedy of manners. Who’d want to read something like that , even if it is set in Florence? (it isn’t) With Forster in the clear, I downloaded the audiobook version of A Room and was soon mentally strolling the streets of Florence with its heroine, Lucy Honeychurch, who turns out to have a refreshingly feminist bent. The story unfolds in a mostly predictable way, but I appreciated Forster’s ...