Reading in Florence

Ninety per cent of the population of Florence is Roman Catholic. Apparently that’s common knowledge, but sometimes it’s the little things that hammer home the big statistics. In my case it was a recent tour of the city’s bookshops, which reveal far more besides about Florentine reading habits relative to British ones. Many of the general bookshops in the city centre double as stockists for theologians and are consequently rammed full of browsing monks. The other curious thing about these shops is that several are thence divided again into two halves, one dedicated to novels and non-fiction printed in Italian, the other to the same books printed in English. One such shop I encountered had even laid out its English shelf as almost a mirror image of the Italian shelf.

Books published in both languages and held in genuine esteem among the Florentine residents include a range of Henry James’s novels, and, of course, E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View. All of which would suggest, quite encouragingly, that Florence caters for a keen industry of English/American book-loving tourists; or, perhaps, that its own population enjoys reading in English just as much as it does Italian. Florence isn’t the only city to cater for both markets, but the contrast, in this respect, between its bookshops and its public libraries seems especially charged.

So the libraries. Joining a library in the UK usually involves a bit of form-filling, presentation of some ID, perhaps, but seldom interrogation. Joining a public library in Florence can be quite a different experience. In contrast to the anglophile bookshops, indeed the city as a whole, it’s in the Florentine libraries, of all places, that one suddenly finds oneself in a world where no one speaks English, and not a single book printed in English is on display. Sure, one can order one up from the stacks, but first one must endure the scrutiny of the admission process, decipher the computer system, and certify that your new membership card relates to the correct section of the building. As a researcher, forget waltzing in to consult a manuscript. That requires an upgrade procedure. One senses that visiting a public library is simply something an Englishman, even an Italian-speaking one, simply doesn’t do. Why would a tourist want to visit a library when there are so many international bookshops on the streets, after all? It’s seemingly a very different attitude that governs book buying and book borrowing in this part of the world.

Considering that some of the city’s libraries are located in fine historical buildings it moreover seems bizarre that one is unable to enter all their forecourts without a library pass. Contrast the British Library with its open arm embrace of tourists, frequenters of its Peyton and Byrne cafés and its bookshops; or the Bodleian in Oxford with its soon-to-be forecourt café. Are the Florentines missing a trick, or is the closed-door approach a laudatory attempt to keep the library a sacred thing, a tourist-free zone to contrast the city’s tourist-trodden museums and galleries? Is the Italian bookshop, in all its diversity, destined for greater longevity than its British counterpart?