The Stones of Florence

A stand out work probably best described as travel literature, novelist, critic, and political activist Mary McCarthy’s The Stones of Florence (1959), with photographs by Evelyn Hofer, combines history, artistic and architectural description, and commentary of various kinds. Of particular note is McCarthy's keen knack for social observation. McCarthy first became famous for this particular gift in her scandalous, semi-autobiographical novel, The Company She Keeps, which included thinly veiled representations of many well known contemporary intellectuals and other figures.

“‘How can you stand it?’ This is the first thing the transient visitor to Florence, in summer, wants to know,” McCarthy writes early in The Stones of Florence, “and the last thing too—the eschatological question he leaves echoing in the air as he speeds on to Venice.” McCarthy's approach to the City That Started It All is both personal and hewn from her reflections on the divide between tourist expectation and local experience: “He means the noise, the traffic, and the heat, and something else besides, something he hesitates to mention, in view of former raptures: the fact that Florence seems to him dull, drab, provincial.” She lands on a question that looms in the background of the entire work: “Naples is a taste the contemporary traveler can understand, even if he does not share it. Venice he can understand…Rome…Siena. But Florence?”

McCarthy does not share the implied answer to her own rhetorical question. She does love Florence, for all that it has become “stout” and dingy in its old age, in great part, because of her minute knowledge of its illustrious history. In her inimitable and lively style, she focuses on this history throughout the bulk of the remainder of The Stones of Florence. She explains that Florence's history was “a history of innovations.” To the early Florentines, we owe the first work written in the vulgar Italian tongue, the Divina Commedia; the first opera; and the first architectural dome in Europe. Boccacio was history's first literary critic. The Florentines may have been the first to gather demographic statistics – although this is contested, with Venice also laying claim to this title. Florence's university began the study of Greek history. And let us not forget Machiavelli and his pioneering – and still read – treatise on political power and how to wield it with ruthless efficiency.



Much of this innovation was the direct result of Florence's famous first family, the Medicis, whose patronage of the arts elevated Florence to a truly cosmopolitan level. Indeed, the family's influence stretched beyond the City of Lillies' walls to inspire and encourage the arts across Europe. Truly, the Medicis began the Italian Renaissance. Their power derived from their wealth; they were bankers. Nevertheless, they were educated, ambitious, art-loving bankers, and they supported many of the period's greatest names. Giotto, Bruneschelli, Donatello, Michelangelo, and da Vinci – names recognizable worldwide – were all Florentines, who worked at some point under the patronage of the Medicis. More concretely, literally, the Medicis also funded much building in Florence. When natural disasters or factional squabbling damaged the city, the Medicis often paid for repairs, so leaving their stamp architecturally. When the family was finally ousted from the city, Florence's reign as Europe's cultural capital effectively ended.

McCarthy's The Stones of Florence is a classic without a genre – travel writing, technically, but much broader in scope, wittier, and more concerned with history than most in that genre. However, it is also too personal to class as a straightforward historical work – peppered throughout with McCarthy's biting bon mots, and pervaded by an often faintly satirical undertone (as when she calls the figures Michelangelo painted on the Medici tombs “somewhat rubbery”), there is too much of the author in it for its focus to be only on Florence. If anything, the true subject of The Stones of Florence is McCarthy herself – a fact that might lessen the book's impact if McCarthy weren't such an engaging and intelligent writer.