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.