Daisy Dunn

Reading in Florence

Ninety per cent of the population of Florence is Roman Catholic. Apparently that’s common knowledge, but sometimes it’s the little things that hammer home the big statistics. In my case it was a recent tour of the city’s bookshops, which reveal far more besides about Florentine reading habits relative to British ones. Many of the general bookshops in the city centre double as stockists for theologians and are consequently rammed full of browsing monks. The other curious thing about these shops is that several are thence divided again into two halves, one dedicated to novels and non-fiction printed in Italian, the other to the same books printed in English. One such shop I encountered had even laid out its English shelf as almost a mirror image of the Italian shelf.

Books published in both languages and held in genuine esteem among the Florentine residents include a range of Henry James’s novels, and, of course, E.M.

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