But this book is an Anglo-Saxon appreciation of the old school a lapidary tome lacing worshipful scholarship with sardonic wit

But this book is an Anglo-Saxon appreciation of the old school, a lapidary tome lacing worshipful scholarship with sardonic wit that has the satisfying smack of finality about it.
With Levey as guide, we’re not marooned solely in the Renaissance. His tour of Trecento Florence includes a wonderfully impatient put-down of Guelph-Ghibelline factionalism (“like the fight of Tweedledum and Tweedledee”). And long after the great painters have gone and the Medici Grand Dukes have begun their placidly debauched reign, he goes to the trouble of bringing vast swathes of long-ignored Florentine baroque into our line of sight. After this, you feel, anyone else planning to write a history of Florentine achievements in painting, sculpture, architecture, literature and society would do better to look elsewhere.Looking elsewhere, however, is not something the English are very good at: we have always cherry-picked the bits of Italy that please us.

In the old days it was Grand Tourists buying Botticelli altar-pieces on the cheap from needy frati. In these more democratic times, anyone can get their panforte from Tesco and terracotta tiles from Homebase. The one Italian product which is only now finding an English market is the dirty reality on the ground. In the words of William Ward, one of our few unblinkered commentators on modern Italy, “Although no country is better loved by the English than Italy, we are desperately short of good, up-to-date literature about the place.”Of course, there’s no shortage of out-of-date literature, a lot of it undeniably delicious. The visit of Brideshead’s Charles and Sebastian to Venice is spent “drowning in honey, stingless”: mingling with WASPs, in other words, and avoiding wops, and that was pretty much par for the course Italophile literature depopulates the thing it loves. Mounting Giotto’s campanile to gaze westwards, the 20-year-old Ruskin speaks for every travelling aesthete with tunnel vision when he admires “30 miles of most lovely plain, but a great deal cut up by the white houses”.

In our literary infatuation with Italy, you can’t see the people for the purple, and the present is obscured in the long shadow of the past. While Elizabeth Barrett fretted over the future of unified Italy from her sofa in Casa Guidi, her husband left not a single word on the turbulence around him, but hurled himself deep into Florentine history peopled by painters and musicians. A century and a half on, which Browning version is more often read?There’s a perfectly good excuse for this. The instinct of most northerners encountering the south is to seek out and take solace from an Italy of the imagination, an Italy of the senses, about which we naturally have more feelings than thoughts. Plop a buttoned-up English writer in a gondola or an olive grove, and he (and it usually is a he) will emote his socks off till it’s time to take the plane, train or horse-drawn carriage back home. Some never returned, of course, and some never intended to: Smollett, Keats, Shelley, Clough, Landor, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Harold Acton and most recently, John Pope-Hennessy, were among those writers who died in Italy.The first English travellers to hit Italy in numbers were literally escapists – refugees from the Civil War. And that set the tone: although subsequent English settlers frequently opted for Italy because living in comfort was cheaper than at home, the vast body of Anglo-Italian literature was committed to paper by people on holiday.

Forster wrote A Room With A View in a rented house in Poggibonsi. Sea and Sardinia, one of three carefully evocative books about Italy by D H Lawrence, was harvested from a mere six days on the island. The youngish Henry James became a proper novelist in a room overlooking Piazza Santa Maria Novella.Towards the end of Roderick Hudson, the fruit of that confinement, James’s characters loll on a hillside by Lake Como. The author, charged with possession of a pair of rose-tinted spectacles, happily pleads guilty. “It was all consummately picturesque; it was the Italy that we know from the steel engravings in old keepsakes and annuals, from the vignettes on music-sheets and the drop-curtains at theatres; an Italy that we can never confess ourselves – in spite of our own changes and of Italy’s – that we have ceased to believe.” It was, in short, the Italy we know from English literature.One early and prominent emigrant was Sir John Hawkwood, a tanner’s son from Essex, a mercenary who married the Duke of Milan’s daughter in the late 14th century. He fetched up fighting for Florence, which granted him a posthumous portrait by Uccello in the Duomo and an estate near Cortona, quite close to where Germaine Greer, another formidable combatant, would later settle.

But since Hawkwood’s death in 1394, we have invaded Italy armed with pens rather than swords, on a mission to capture not land but landscape. Even Martin Amis brought back a chunk of Italian stone in his linguistic baggage: he named Money’s maternal porn star Caduta Massi, after the roadsign that warns of falling rocks.The peninsula was an indispensable cog in the wheel of our literature. Nowadays the source of sun-dried tomatoes, Italy is where we once went for our stories Imagine Chaucer without Petrarch and Boccaccio. Delete Italy from Shakespeare and you’ve lost ten of the plays. So present is Italy in our literature that Ann Radcliffe was able to set down in The Mysteries of Udolpho a dense description of its beetling topography without enduring the inconvenience of an actual visit. Keats delivered his best writing on Italy – a poem that might make you think twice when you next buy a pot of basil – before he had set foot in it.The sound of the English writer struck dumb by Italy is an occasional treat.