Seducing writers from Boccaccio to EM Forster, this city has given us gossipy and rich histories, and a shadowy backdrop to crime
‘Florence is a very noir city,” a film-maker once told me 10 years ago, on learning that I wrote thrillers set there. (The sixth in my Florentine detective series, The Viper, is out now.) We were looking down on lovely Piazza Santa Croce, scene of a thousand years of bloody jousts and tournaments and the staggeringly violent Florentine football, Calcio Storico, and the words made perfect sense to me.
For the casual visitor, Italy is Tennyson’s “lands of summer” and Florence an elegant confection of galleries and architecture, of World Heritage sites and gelato. On the ground, though, in the deep shadow of the narrow streets and austere, towering facades of the cradle of the Renaissance, there are immigrants who live six to a room behind secret doors, there are drug deals and knife fights and girls who go home with the wrong guy. You don’t have to stay for long to see the intense drama of the city that plays out down every alley. The books I’ve chosen reflect just that dangerous, seductive chiaroscuro.
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