Romola

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.

Romola de' Bardi

The Ponte Vecchio

Proem · 1% through the novel

And there flows Arno, with its bridges just where they used to be—the Ponte Vecchio, least like other bridges in the world, laden with the same quaint shops where our Spirit remembers lingering a little on his way perhaps to look at the progress of that great palace which Messer Luca Pitti had set a-building with huge stones got from the Hill of Bogoli (now Boboli) close behind.

Eliot opens with a Spirit of the old Florentine dead looking down on the unchanged city. The Ponte Vecchio, still lined with its shops over the Arno, is the first landmark he names, and the reader's first fixed point in the map.

explicit Named directly in the text.

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