Fiesole in Italy: escape Florence’s tourist crowds in tranquil Tuscan town that has long inspired authors and artists
- Just 5km from Florence, verdant Fiesole, haunt of Dante, Charles Dickens and more, has handsome villas, historic buildings and hotels that preserve their pasts
On the forested slopes below the Italian town of Fiesole, Lucy Honeychurch, the heroine of E.M. Forster’s 1908 novel A Room with a View, stumbles into a clearing bright with violets.
George Emerson, who had been quietly admiring the view before her intrusion, is so overwhelmed – “he saw radiant joy in her face, he saw the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves” – that he throws social propriety to the wind and kisses her.
This Tuscan scene is pivotal in the stuttering romance between George and Lucy, a relationship George’s father hopes will ease his son’s brooding anxieties.
Emerson Snr urges Lucy to assist George through his inner conflicts to a sense of peace and joy; in what is surely one of the great lines of modern literature he says: “Make him realise that by the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes – a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.”
This is not the only literary appeal for the affirmative that has echoed through the air of Fiesole, whether in the imaginary spring breezes of a book or the still heat of a real-life summer.
In the same year that Forster’s classic was published, American writer and feminist icon Gertrude Stein climbed a hill above Fiesole with Alice Toklas, who was also holidaying in Tuscany for the summer.