"Long ago Margaret Drabble fell for the colours of Florence. Now it’s the semi-precious stones that especially delight her ...I first saw Florence aged 17, and it changed the colours of the visible world for ever. I came from a country of green and grey, from a sober Quaker schooling in York, where the incomprehensibly Gothic Minster rose in flights of serious masonry into a sombre English sky. Florence was bright and luminous and light of heart and its churches were polychrome. This astonished me, as we had never studied architecture. I had never seen anything like those facades, their delicate pinks and whites and greens and greys, their stripes and bands and barley-sugar twists of marble, their cloisters of cypresses and orange trees. I had crossed the Alps, alone in a second-class sleeper, and come out of a dark tunnel into a paradise of sunlit colour. I had stumbled, like a time traveller, into the Renaissance."
I read this twice because I was so dazzled and could not take it all in. Florence--I have always wanted to go to Florence. Another powerful reminder why. What else is there to say? I will read it for a third time, guided by Drabble's firm and competent hand. The younger sister of A.S. Byatt (one of the best British novelists going), and a novelist of some note herself, her reportage here is frankly reverent, humane, self-effacing, and plainspoken in the best and most thoroughgoing sense. It is enough, as Conrad said, to make one see.
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