Customer Reviews

Florence, A Delicate Case (The Writer and the City)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

What a disappointment. David Leavitt has accomplished almost the impossible. He has managed to make what is in my opinion one of the most beautiful cities on earth dull. This book opens with such a great first line: "Florence has always been a popular destination for suicides." After a few interesting pages, however, I found myself in page after page of virtually unreadable prose. Leavitt even manages to make the moving of Michelangelo's famous statute of David not very interesting. I'm not quite sure what went wrong. I had read his previous book ITALIAN PLEASURES written with Mark Mitchell. While I did not find it the greatest travel book ever written, it was certainly a pleasant enough read.

I was amused to see that Leavitt describes Franco Zeffirelli's autobiographical film "Tea with Mussolini" as making "for a camp spectacle that recalls some of the graver excess committed by Zeffirelli in his career as an opera director." Would that we had a little more camp excess here. Near the end of the book Leavitt's account of the young people or "mud angels" who came to Florence to help save books and art after the flood of 1966 was interesting. If we only had more such stories.

If I didn't already love Florence, this book would not convince me to visit.

I have mixed feelings about this book. I found the chapter on homosexuality in Florence interesting, but a tiny phrase let it down. In the lesser space accorded the lesbian population, Mrs George Keppel is described as the mother of "yet another" lesbian. As if by there being four or five renowned lesbian inhabitants amongst the far more numerous gay males, they were forming a disproportionately large segment of the population! I found that quite odd.

I also found it difficult to reconcile Leavitt's bitchiness about the lack of contact the earlier generations of ex-pats had with the locals (to the point of "like many" not knowing any Italian) with the lack of presence of any contemporary Florentines in his narrative, given that he is a part-time resident himself.

I loved the chapter about the "mud angels", brief as it was, and would have enjoyed more about the relationship between locals and expats alike with the art of this wonderful city.

Having said all that, I did enjoy the book overall and it is a welcome addition to the background literature of Italy which I read voraciously.

This new series proves to be a very helpful and interesting one, if a bit subjectibe, and Laevitt's work on Florence is compelling indeed. My main problem with his writing is the same problem I have with the rest of his books I've read--one senses he considers himself and his experiences a bit too highly for anybody's good. But while he's not an "original" or a first-rate cultural observer or "arbiter", his learning is put forth in lucid, intelligent prose--with many nice touches.

from a very good writer. Absolutely a let-down -- nothing but a very brief untidy mish-mash of foreigners in Florence..My suggestion would be to pick up a copy of Mary McCarthy's stones of venice & florence -- it's a little outdated, but for an equally brief book is packed with fascinating information that will give you a real handle on this fantastic city...

Florence, A Delicate Case is the most interesting book about the City of the Lily since Mary McCarthy's The Stones of Florence. Leavitt has written about aspects of Florence's history that even history itself has tended to overlook, and so he illuminates this city for anyone who has ever been there, or plans to go there, or even just hopes to go there. Although this is far from being a "guide book," it so uniquely maps out a lost Florence, and records the names of so many of its ghosts, that it should be in every suitcase bound for Italy. In sum: a wonderful book from a wonderful writer.

I've just completed Florence: A Delicate Case and was engrossed from start to finish. Mr. Leavitt, with his beautiful literary style, has captured the heart and soul of Florence in this wonderful book which will be enjoyed by those who have visited Italy and those who have not. This book is rich and lush historically and I wish it had been written before I visited Florence several years ago-it would have enhanced by stay there. Anyone traveling to Italy should pack this book first! Likewise if you're going to the beach or the mountains. This is a fabulous read!

The Writer and the City books are supposed to be idiosyncratic, and I greatly liked Edmund White's quirky but useful volume on Paris. However, with his "Florence, A Delicate Case," David Leavitt firmly crosses the line between idiosyncrasy and self-indulgence. His third chapter--40 pages of a book of only 176 pages, including notes--is devoted to mentioning seemingly every homosexual writer who has ever visited the city in the last 200 years. This exercise COULD have been fascinating--maybe, in a separate book--but Leavitt appears so anxious to squeeze the names and titles into this pocket-sized volume that we are given very little accompanying narrative which would bring this very interesting group to life.
With a city that is a mass of artistic treasure, Leavitt, who has lived there--lucky fellow--for years, would have done the reader a much greater service had he applied some better organization to this book. I wanted to like it (Leavitt has a good sense of syntax and vocabulary, and he is clearly a fund of knowledge), but ended up feeling cheated of better structural choices and the advantages of his educated vision.

boh. The italian word to express "meh, i don't know..." This book grabbed me from the first pages, as another reviewer noted, that Florence is a city where people go to commit suicide. However, I never really grasped the point of the book as a whole. Some chapters were concise and well done, full of intriguing facts.....other chapters literally put me to sleep. Of course the 'Grand Tour' and ex-pat population in Florence is a weighty piece of its history. However, I found myself not really caring about insignificant love rivalries involving unimportant 'historical' figures. At the end of the day, I really don't even know hoe to describe this book.....it's not a travelogue, not a guide book, not a memoir, nor is it an historical compilation. boh. I guess I will just give my opinion that I found it boring and incohesive. We go from suicide, to sexually promiscuous (...in a word: easy) female American students, to random anecdotes about sandwich shops, highbrow BS about Britons I couldn't care less about, etc etc...

There is no story in this book. The name dropping is exasperating. Plus I thought the book was about Florence, not about English people living in Florence. I couldn't bring myself to finish this very tiny book with large prints and big indentations... I guess I won't sell it so I can have the whole Writer and the City series... otherwise it would go to the bin.

Edmund White's THE FLANEUR, A STROLL THROUGH THE PARADOXES OF PARIS is not your ordinary guide book for Americans visiting Paris. And so, another Bloomsbury edition, David Leavitt's FLORENCE, A DELICATE CASE is not your "run-of-the-mill-go-visit-this-museum-and-then-have-pasta-in-this-trattoria" travel book. (It is actually the third volume in Bloomsbury's "Writer and The City" series.) Both White's and Leavitt's books are extremely personal, sincere takes on one of the authors' favorite cities. Naturally, since Leavitt has chosen to live in Italy and to study Florence, he knows the city very, very well. Interestingly, he knows the literary and social history of the city. Even more interesting to me is his knowledge of how and why Florence has appealed to any number of artists from Tschaikovsky to E.M. Forster and fellow "travel" essayist, Mary McCarthy. This is a beautifully written and beautifully produced book. The jacket design and photograph are particularly handsome.

A good deal of this very small volume is spent on homosexual tradition and history in Florence, naturally enough since homosexuality informs all of Leavitt's writings, fiction and non-fiction, either in the forefront or on the back burner.

And almost best of all, at the book's close, Leavitt treats the reader to an index bulging with titles and short descriptions of guide books, novels, memoirs, poems, etc. all of which have Florence as their spring-board. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED both for the plane-hopping traveller and the one stuck in an armchair.