Stones of Florence

The Stones of Florence by Mary McCarthy, 119 pages

Florence.  The home of Dante and Giotto, Donatello and Brunelleschi, Fra Angelico and Leonardo, Boccacio and Michelangelo, Machiavelli and Galileo.  The city where Savonarola preached and the first opera was performed.  The center of European culture for two hundred years.

Novelist and cultural commentator Mary McCarthy wrote The Stones of Florence in the mid-'50s.  She attempts to capture the spirit of the city, of the ways it remained the same and the ways it changed down through its history, from its Roman origins to its Italian present, with an understandable emphasis on its Renaissance golden age.  Although very different from The Stones of Venice, the author justifies her Ruskinian title with the book's central reflection, that "a terrible mistake was committed here, at some point between Giotto and Michelangelo, a mistake that had to do with power and megalomania or gigantism of the human ego."

The 1959 edition is lavishly illustrated, with a full page photograph facing nearly every page of text (it is my understanding that later editions did not include these photos).