Were the role of Florence in the history of the visual arts to be comparable to that of, say, Bournemouth, the name of the ancient city on the Arno would still resound as one of the cultural centres of Europe. As a city of literature, she has few rivals. The Italian language as we know it is basically mediaeval Tuscan, refined and burnished and standardised by Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, all (more or less) fourteenth-century Florentines. They not only laid the foundations of one of the great bodies of world literature, but provided a lingua franca for the politically fissiparous peninsula – and for courtly and cultured communication for the rest of civilized Europe during the Renaissance and Early Modern periods.

Italian literature, however, plays a subsidiary role in this tour: English (and American) predominates. The Athens on the Arno was an extraordinary magnet for writers of all sorts. Milton was a precocious visitor (he met Galileo), but it was from the beginning of the nineteenth century that a trickle became a flood – Shelley, Byron and Scott; the Brownings, Dickens and Eliot; Henry James, Forster and Lawrence. These are just some of the bigger names; the penumbra of lesser men of letters, diarists, historians and critics is countless.

The English and American communities in and around Florence may have numbered 30,000 at the turn of the nineteenth century. A sunny place for shady people? Some were running away (there was a perceptible increase after the trial of Oscar Wilde), but climate, beauty, cheap servants and the presence of fellow aesthetes were honorable enough reasons for voluntary exile or short-term sojourn. There would have been few who chose Florence who were not motivated by the presence of its mighty cultural achievements, and, by extension, by the presence of people of similar cultivation, tastes and interests.

The heart of the tour consists of historical discourse, biographical narrative and literary interpretation provided by writer, historian and critic Jonathan Keates, illustrated with pertinent texts read by actor Charles Neville. The result should be an enriched understanding of the work of a number of great writers, and a novel and illuminating perspective on the most alluring of all Italian cities.

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