A Room with a View

A young Englishwoman on the Grand Tour is unsettled by Florence and by a fellow guest at her pension, and the feeling follows her home. Part One maps the real city: a pension on the Arno embankment, the church of Santa Croce, the Piazza della Signoria where she faints, and the violet-covered slopes at Fiesole. Part Two moves to the Surrey hills near Dorking, mapped as scenes outside the setting.

Lucy Honeychurch

The Pension Bertolini, on the Lungarno

Chapter 1

The novel opens at an English pension on the river, where the heroine is given a room facing a courtyard rather than the Arno she was promised. A fellow guest offers to swap so she can have her view, and the small act of kindness starts everything. Forster set the fictional pension on the embankment he knew from his own stay near Santa Croce.

Chapter 1

inspired by The Pension Bertolini is invented, but Forster drew it from the Pensione Simi at 2 Lungarno delle Grazie, where he stayed with his mother in 1901; sited on that stretch of the Arno embankment.

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