Mapped
A Room with a View
E. M. Forster
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.
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Romola
George Eliot
Eliot's Florence of the 1490s, researched to the stone. The Mercato Vecchio where the book opens, the Duomo and its Baptistery, the Ponte Vecchio over the Arno, San Marco where Savonarola is prior, the Piazza della Signoria of the Bonfire of the Vanities, and the Via de' Bardi in Oltrarno where the blind scholar Bardo lives with his daughter Romola. It brings George Eliot into the atlas, and a second Florence four centuries before A Room with a View.
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The Decameron
Giovanni Boccaccio
The frame of the hundred tales, set in and just outside Florence in the plague year of 1348. The death-dealing pestilence empties the city; seven young ladies meet by chance in the church of Santa Maria Novella and resolve to flee; with three young men they retire two short miles into the hills toward Fiesole, to a villa traditionally identified with Poggio Gherardo; from there they wander to the secluded Valley of the Ladies; and at the end the company returns to Santa Maria Novella, whence it set out. The hundred tales roam all of Europe, but the setting the map fixes is this Florentine frame, the ground of the greatest book of the Italian Middle Ages.
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The English Patient
Michael Ondaatje
The frame of the novel is a bombed-out villa in the Tuscan hills as the war in Italy ends: a nurse, a burned man, a thief and a sapper hold together in the ruins of a former nunnery above Florence. The map centres on Villa San Girolamo at Fiesole and the city below, and reaches out to the Egyptian and Libyan desert the patient remembers.
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