Blue cloth binding with gilt title on the spine and front board.

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Cloth. Condition: Very Good. Helen M. Jane; Nelly Erichsen (illustrator). A volume from the ‘Medieval Towns’ series of illustrated town histories by J. M. Dent, concerned with the histories of European towns. The Story of Florence, revised edition. Written by Edmund G Gardner with illustrations by Nelly Erichson. Complete with a city plan. In the original publisher’s uniform full cloth bindings with gilt tooling to spine and boards. Externally very smart with minor shelf wear. Internally, firmly bound. Light minor spotting to first and last few leaves, pages otherwise generally bright and clean. Very good book.

 View of Florence by Hartmann Schedel, published in 1493

Florence is the capital city of the region of Tuscany in Central Italy. It is also the most populated city in Tuscany, with 360,930 inhabitants in 2023, and 984,991 in its metropolitan area.

Florence was a centre of medieval European trade and finance and one of the wealthiest cities of that era. It is considered by many academics to have been the birthplace of the Renaissance, becoming a major artistic, cultural, commercial, political, economic and financial center. During this time, Florence rose to a position of enormous influence in Italy, Europe, and beyond. Its turbulent political history includes periods of rule by the powerful Medici family and numerous religious and republican revolutions. From 1865 to 1871 the city served as the capital of the Kingdom of Italy. The Florentine dialect forms the base of Standard Italian and it became the language of culture throughout Italy due to the prestige of the masterpieces by Dante Alighieri, Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio, Niccolò Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini.

The city attracts millions of tourists each year, and UNESCO declared the Historic Centre of Florence a World Heritage Site in 1982. The city is noted for its culture, Renaissance art and architecture and monuments. The city also contains numerous museums and art galleries, such as the Uffizi Gallery and the Palazzo Pitti, and still exerts an influence in the fields of art, culture and politics. Due to Florence’s artistic and architectural heritage, Forbes ranked it as one of the most beautiful cities in the world in 2010. Florence plays an important role in Italian fashion, and is ranked in the top 15 fashion capitals of the world by Global Language Monitor; furthermore, it is a major national economic centre, as well as a tourist and industrial hub.