JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Best guide to Florence: A Room With A View by E.M. Forster. Charming novel, and short. Or you could watch the faithful Merchant-Ivory adaptation starring Helena Bonham-Carter, Julian Sands, and Daniel Day-Lewis. Have the folks leave the room when Lucy Honeychurch returns to England, lest they have conniptions when Julian Sands and company take off their clothes, run around the woods, and jump in the pond. 

 

Photo: Palazzo Vecchio with tourist hordes, 2006

“Enjoying Florence — a hard, forbidding city (“a city of endurance,” Mary McCarthy called it, “a city of stone”), handsome but not pretty, a challenge even if you could siphon off the tourists and replace them with picturesque Italians energetically engaged in producing local color — enjoying Florence takes more time and more effort. But if you have with you your copy of “A Room With a View,” you’ll find it easier to get along. Forster’s supple, forgiving irony, his ability to satirize lovingly, combined with his firm but regretful insistence on not confusing art and life, is exactly what you need if you plan to share this intensely urban town with tens of thousands of sightseers for the five or six days it will take you to do just like them and see the sights.” Florence, Then and Now, With a Literary Guide, in NYT.