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out much had to content themselves with homosexual ‘walkers’ – a version of the Florentine cicisbeo – and this was in all probability the kind of relationship that Mrs Ross enjoyed with the Marchese when Ouida decided to thrust herself into the picture.
    Poor Ouida! She simply didn’t get it. Although she considered herself forward-thinking, even naughty, in comparison to the Anglo-Florentines she was a naïf. When the Marchese refused her demand that he give up his friendship with Mrs Ross as proof of his loyalty to her, she took it for granted that the two were having an affair, and as an act of vendetta, quickly dispatched Friendship, a rubbishy roman-à-clef in which she cast the Marchese as the dashing Prince Ioris, herself as the tubercular ingénue Etoile, and Mrs Ross as the shrewish mondaine Lady Joan Challoner, who blackmails the good-natured prince in order to guarantee his fidelity. To avoid a libel suit, Ouida also cast Rome as Florence, with the flat campagna doing a particularly bad job of interpreting the countryside around Scandicci.
    Mrs Ross was outraged. Soon rumor had her attempting to horsewhip Ouida on Via Tornabuoni, and Ouida shooting at Mrs Ross in her villa. All of this is nonsense; what is certain is that Mrs Ross nursed an intractable grudge about the affair, and was said still to be keeping a copy of Friendship in her bathroomfor use as toilet paper even years after Ouida had died in Viareggio, destitute and forgotten, having starved herself to feed her many dogs.
    Ouida is typical of the sort of mediocrity that Florence has latterly attracted. Better writers (Forster, James) came early and left, or came after they were already famous (Browning, Landor). Although Aldous Huxley loved Florence at first, his enthusiasm palled quickly, leading him to move his family to Rome. (In a letter to his brother he wrote, ‘After a third-rate provincial town, colonized by English sodomites and middle-aged Lesbians, which is, after all, what Florence is, a genuine metropolis will be lively.’) In his Italian diaries, Goethe virtually ignores Florence, noting only that:
I took a quick walk through the city to see the Duomo and the Battistero. Once more, a completely new world opened up before me, but I did not wish to stay long. The location of the Boboli Gardens is marvellous. I hurried out of the city as quickly as I entered it.
    Although Goethe never specifies what drove him to leave so precipitously, a palpable air of unease hangs over this paragraph. Nor is he the only writer whose descriptive capacities the city’s darker aspect has managed to flummox. Even James was left at a loss for words, attributing to Florence ‘a kind of grave radiance – a harmony of high tints – which I scarce know how to describe’. Many years later Firbank called Florence ‘a rather sinister city’, and through the voice of Countess Yvorra in The Flower Beneath the Foot, implicitly lampooned the river view for which Lucy Honeychurch hearkens:
Ah, and Florence, too, I regret to say I found very far from what it ought to have been!!! I had a window giving onto the Arno, and so I could observe … I used to see some curious sights! I would not care to scathe your ears, my Innocent, by an inventory of one half of the wantonness that went on; enough to say the tone of the place forced me to fly to Rome, where beneath the shadow of dear St Peter’s I grew gradually less distressed.
    This last line may also be a gentle elbowing of A Room with a View, since in the novel Charlotte Bartlett, to save Lucy from the predatory influences of George Emerson, absconds with the girl to Rome. In both books, Rome – that capital in which Catholic piety shares such an uneasy bed with Pagan splendor – offers itself as an antidote to Florentine dissolution, a place to recuperate and seek absolution. Yet the medicine works in neither case, and in Forster’s words, ‘the companion who is merely uncongenial in the medieval world