A Literary Focus Blurs the Joys of Florence

FLORENCE, A DELICATE CASE

By David Leavitt

Bloomsbury, $16.95

When David Leavitt first visited Florence in 1982, he was a college student from Palo Alto, and the city’s layers of art and history so overwhelmed him in four days that he cut short the rest of his European itinerary and went home, feeling “irritable, impatient, inadequate.”

Leavitt went on to make a name for himself as a novelist and writer of short stories and then, in 1993, returned to Florence for a sort of experimental residence with his partner, Mark Mitchell.

This book’s 176 pages are distilled from the author’s daily wanderings and from Leavitt’s reading of earlier writings by foreigners on Florence; indeed, he gives us too little of the wanderings and too much of the reading. It’s nothing new for a slumming novelist to offer up a slender travel book, but this one seems to contain more research than most and less joy.

The book starts provocatively, with a discussion of suicides by foreigners in the city. Then it evolves into a meditation on the many English-speaking writers and intellectuals who, since the mid-19th century, have come to Florence, spent much energy on squabbles and intrigues within the English-speaking colony and only occasionally produced enduring work. E.M. Forster is here, and Mary McCarthy, Norman Douglas, Bernard Berenson and Harold Acton, among many others.

The literary focus is logical enough. Leavitt’s volume is part of a series from Bloomsbury, “The Writer and the City,” that also features works by Edmund White (on Paris) and Peter Carey (on Sydney, Australia). And amid the local literary history (including a thorough look at the city’s gay scene over generations past), Leavitt does wield his words memorably.

Consider these lines sketching a sculpture of Neptune near the Palazzo Vecchio: “Looking at him, you finally understand why sculptors fought over blocks of white Carrara marble. You want to take off your shoes, wade through the fountains, scrape at the green algae on his flanks with your nails.”

But in my reading, it wasn’t until Chapter 4, 115 pages in, that the book hit its most agreeable stride. That’s when Leavitt tells us tales of older and newer Florence. For instance, he reveals that the chunk of marble that Michelangelo cut into his famous David was first quarried for use on the city’s Opera del Duomo, then chiseled inexpertly by a lesser sculptor, and only then handed to Michelangelo. He outlines the strange steps taken to hide and protect the great museums’ artworks when it became clear that Italy would be caught up in the ground fighting of World War II. And he revisits the heroic efforts of students (and hippies) who waded in to rescue works from the city’s ill-protected libraries in the flood of 1966. Never mind the squabbling English-speakers. Behind the exhilaration and evocative nature of these tales lies the reason so many visitors and expats still find their way to Florence.

*

OUR PARIS: SKETCHES

FROM MEMORY

By Edmund White

Ecco, $19.95

Here, in this small and fine book, is the yin to Leavitt’s yang.

White (a literary hero of Leavitt’s, as it happens) moved to Paris with his partner, Hubert Sorin, just a year after Leavitt arrived in Florence. But all similarity ends there. White’s writerly touch is feathery light; his research, if any, is invisible; and his wry anecdotes of street characters, cocktail parties and odd moments in the market (who knew the grocer was a Cambodian poet?) conjure a living, breathing, amusing Paris.

White’s basset hound, Fred, also features prominently. At one spot near the Pompidou Centre, White writes of Fred, “I encourage him to defecate on the grill above the underground center for experimental music, directed by Pierre Boulez, who once refused to give me an interview.”

The wit is underlined by Sorin’s elegant drawings. Yet none of this is really whimsy. White and Sorin came to Paris to take what enjoyment they could as Sorin’s AIDS advanced. There’s virtually no clue of this in the main text and drawings; it’s only White’s introduction and afterword that frame the anecdotes with grim context. The partners finished their jaunty manuscript and playful drawings just weeks before Sorin’s death in 1994 at age 32. (The book was first published that year under the title “Sketches From Memory.”)

*

KNOPF GUIDES: CALIFORNIA

Knopf, $25

It’s hard to imagine a more profusely illustrated guidebook, and there’s great utility in that. I would still sooner trust a couple of photographs than a couple of paragraphs when choosing an unfamiliar neighborhood in San Francisco to explore. But the larger, half-hidden theme to this guide is globalism: Consult the fine print a few pages in, and you find that Knopf is basically recycling this book. This first American edition (edited in London and printed in Italy) is actually the translated version of a French guidebook published last year in Paris. Hence the odd ring of sentences such as this one on traffic: “Los Angeles will divert you, literally as well as metaphorically!”

It’s also slim on hotel and restaurant recommendations (just five hotels listed in San Diego County, a couple of them in inland locations that are inconvenient for most visitors). On the upside, the authors take nothing for granted and give more cultural context (from race relations to economic underpinnings) and historical detail than do most guidebooks.

*

STEPS TO WATER: THE ANCIENT STEPWELLS OF INDIA

By Morna Livingston

Princeton Architectural Press, $50

Think of Egypt’s great pyramids, inverted and elegantly lodged in the earth to serve a subcontinent’s thirst for water. That’s the role of India’s stepwells and stepped ponds, which, from the 5th through 19th centuries, served to catch water from the monsoons and save it for drinking, washing and bathing. These stone buildings, some as deep as nine stories with elaborate carved walls, columns and towers, are largely unappreciated outside the country and neglected and underprotected inside the country, circumstances this book hopes to change.

These photographs (color and black-and-white, all by the author) and architectural drawings can be staggering; think of an M.C. Escher pattern tugged into three dimensions and reflected in a pool. Author Morna Livingston, an image maker and a scholar, has studied India’s stepwells for 15 years and spent four extended trips visiting and photographing them.

*

Calendar writer Christopher Reynolds’ travel books column appears twice a month.