One doesn't come to Italy for niceness...

‘One doesn't come to Italy for niceness … one comes for life.’ Eleanor Lavish in EM Forster’s A Room with a View

A lot of my ideas about this Italian city before I arrived here were, I must admit, drawn from EM Forster’s A Room with a View. Funny, then, to find how little some things seem to have changed from the Edwardian era of Forster's novel, social attitudes aside. Tourists still flood Florence, travelling to Italy is still a rite of passage for countless young men and women in search of art, food, wine and true love. And if Italy was a favourite destination for the English in the past couple of centuries, it has become a mecca for travellers around the world now. Lonely Planet guides replace the ubiquitous Baedeker, the guide Miss Lavish so unhelpfully takes from Lucy Honeychurch, leaving her stranded in Santa Croce; instead of young travellers being chaperoned abroad by older friends or family, they head to coach tours, youth hostels and language courses; everyone still has their opinion about what you should see first, overwhelming the new visitor with ‘perfect torrents of information’; and there is on certain street corners ‘a smell! A true Florentine smell!’