This volume features a collection of letters, diaries and memoirs of travellers to Florence from past centuries and of the Florentines themselves. The extracts chosen include: Boccaccio on the Black Death; Vasari on the building of Giotto's Campanile; an eye-witness account of the installation of Michaelangelo's "David"; the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning at the Casa Guidi; and D.H. Lawrence and Dylan Thomas on 20th-century Florentine society. Sir Harold Acton provides a concise history of the city from its origins, through its zenith as a prosperous city state which, under the Medici, gave birth to the Renaissance, and up to the Arno's devastating flood in 1966. Sir Harold Acton, man of letters, historian, aesthete, novelist and poet, has spent most of his life in Florence. Among his best-known books is "The Last Medici, Memoirs of an Aesthete".