A place to live and die

This book is part of a Bloomsbury series entitled The Writer and the City. Edmund White has written one about Paris; Peter Carey's 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account sounds particularly promising. The romance of the writer abroad, which is also the romance of ourselves abroad, has been tarnished by over-familiarity - one can go and see it oneself for less money, apparently, than is required to remain at home. For the price of a guide book you can dispense with travel writing altogether.

And yet the experience remains stubbornly the province of literature, not because tourism is blind, nor because your four-day minibreak in Barcelona is an act of vandalism, but because the writer's sensibility acts as a bridge between the known and the unknown, between ourselves and what is foreign to us.

"The promise," writes David Leavitt, "of a destiny, verging on the erotic on one side and the artistic on the other, seems always to have attached itself to Florence in the imagination of the foreigner, drawing him to the city not merely so that he can see, but so that he can be or become something more than he is. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that in Florence he hopes to retrieve a quality endemic to himself, the expression of which the atmosphere of home has stifled."

Leavitt is an American novelist who first went to Florence as a student. The city is full of such students, among other foreigners, all hoping for the transformation, or restitution, he describes. It is by art that they seek to be transformed, with more or less alacrity - it is not uncommon now, Leavitt notes, for the tourist or coach-party to achieve it with only a day's, or sometimes a few hours', immersion. Later Leavitt moved to the city with his partner.

It is not, he acknowledges, a welcoming place: "Look carefully at the facade of the Duomo, and you will discern, to the right of the right set of doors, an angel making an offensive gesture, right arm crooked, hand balled into a fist, left hand resting on right biceps: vaffanculo!"

Yet "the little treasure-city is", as Henry James wrote, "if ever there was one, a delicate case". This shrine of Western culture has more than once been confused with something you can possess. Countless writers and artists have made it their habitat. For suicides, too, it "has always been a popular destination". But it is the visitors from the late Victorian world, the characters of EM Forster and Henry James and their real-life counterparts, who have done the most to shape our idea of Florence as both colony and menace, a garden of delights where the self can unexpectedly unravel and find itself interred, in paint or stone.

The search for the "real" Florence preoccupied its admirers then and now. Describing the tortuous transportation in 1874 of Michelangelo's

David from its weather-blown site in the Piazza della Signoria to the shelter of the Accademia delle Belle Arti, Leavitt exquisitely imagines the statue's consciousness: "And what might such a consciousness - at once freighted and fragile - possibly resemble? What kind of memory would stone possess?"

Leavitt asserts that those who live in Florence, himself included, rarely go to look at the art. Florence and its treasures live parallel lives: when the city was devastated by floods in 1966, it was not the lost art but the 15,000 wrecked cars that shocked the nation. Leavitt, too, kept his head in Florence by learning the value of practicality over mythology. This clever book is a light-hearted lecture to those tempted to do otherwise, in this "most elegant, interesting and comfortable of prisons".