A Traveller's Companion to Florence: Traveller's Companion To...

This concise and lucid history of Florence--from its early days, through its zenith as a prosperous city state that gave birth to the Renaissance, up to the Arno's devastating flood in 1966--is accompanied by maps, engravings, and useful notes.

Edward Chaney taught at the University of Pisa for six years and was an associate at Harvard University's Villa I Tatti in Florence while working on this book. His Warburg Institute Ph.D. on seventeenth-century travel in Italy was published as The Grand Tour and the Great Rebellion. His more recent books include The Evolution of the Grand Tour and an edition of Jones's Roman Sketchbook. He is now professor of at the Southampton Institute. Sir Harold Acton (1904?94), a distinguished man of letters, historian, aesthete, novelist and poet, spent most of his life in Florence, the city that made him an honorary citizen in 1986. Among his best-known books are The Last Medici, Memoirs of an Aesthete, and The Bourbous of Naples. Also relevant are his Three Extraordinary Ambassadors and The Pazzi Conspiracy. He bequeathed the magnificent Florentine Villa la Pietra, in which he was born and died, to New York University to be used as an educational center for the arts.