Fun-loving foreigners who frolic in Florence

Florence: a delicate case, by David Leavitt

Florence is not the most welcoming of cities. To the author of this charmingly idiosyncratic guide, its reserve is symbolised by one of the angels on the façade of the Duomo, which greets the visitor with a decidedly unethereal gesture, "right arm crooked, hand balled into a fist, left hand resting on right biceps: vaffanculo!".

Visitors have nevertheless braved the city's indifference. In the early 1870s, 30,000 of its 200,000 residents were either English or American. Today, nearly 25 American universities maintain campuses there. Moreover, David Leavitt notes that Florence is the only European city whose most famous citizens in the past 150 years have been foreigners. His own account reflects this, since, with two brief exceptions, it is a Medici-free zone; Savonarola is mentioned only once and Machiavelli not at all. He focuses on the expatriates and exiles who have made Florence their home.

There are two reasons for the city's unique appeal. The first, self-evidently, is visual. It is estimated that Florence houses almost a fifth of the world's great art treasures. Indeed, such is the danger of cultural overload that one psychiatrist has coined the term "Stendhal syndrome" to describe it, after an episode in which the novelist suffered palpitations and a falling sensation during a visit to the basilica of Santa Croce in 1817.

The second reason is the city's reputation for sexual – and, especially, homosexual – laxity. As early as the 16th century, a German dictionary defined "Florenzer" as "buggerer" and the verb "Florenszen" as "to bugger", while an 18th-century English pamphlet described Italy itself as "the mother and nurse of sodomy". As usual, such descriptions acted more as an incentive than a deterrent, prompting generations of writers and artists, from Wincklemann Tchaikovsky, Henry James, Ronald Firbank and EM Forster to Leavitt himself, to sojourn and settle there.

Aldous Huxley described it as "a third-rate provincial town, colonised by English sodomites and middle-aged Lesbias". Despite nods to Radclyffe Hall and the intriguing Sapphic partnership of aunt and niece Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who wrote undistinguished poetry under the nom-de-plume Michael Field, Leavitt focuses on the former.

He follows Edward Prime-Stevenson in noting that the liberty enjoyed by homosexual émigrés in Italy "seems remarkably often to have had the effect of destroying their intellectual or artistic activity and ambition". While great writers such as Henry James and even Forster rarely stayed in the city for long, it was second-rank figures such as Osbert Sitwell, Norman Douglas and Harold Acton (against whom Leavitt displays an amusing animus) who made it their home. Their typical literary enterprise was, in Leavitt's phrase, "garden know-how combined with gossip".

Leavitt deftly avoids that category. With his dry wit and sharp turn of phrase, he makes reading about Florence as complex and, at times, as compromising an experience as visiting it.

The reviewer's novel 'Easter' is published by Arcadia Books