Florence

Carole has called this the most beautiful city she has ever seen and I comment that it is the only city Napoleon didn’t destroy, though I don’t know where I heard that and don’t know if it is even true. It is true that the German’s blew up the city’s bridges on the morning of August4, 1944—with the exception of the Ponte Vecchio.

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We rushed back to the Villa Medici from lunch in the Piazza della Republica as the sky broke open: the first rain in a week. We repaired to our room and I finished up Looking for George Orwell in Burma and picked up Elliott Hester’s Adventures of a Continental Drifter—both travel books of a sort, though Burma book is more a polemic vies-á-vie literary documentary.