The English-speaking world’s fascination with Florence goes back a long way, but it is only in the second half of the nineteenth century that lovers of art, literature, and enchanting Tuscan scenery, both from Europe and America, descended on Dante’s homeland in droves, from Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady) to Robert Browning, and later E. M. Forster (A Room with a View) and Bernard Berenson. Florentines called them “anglo-beceri” [Anglo-boors], an amiable dig at their misguided efforts to pronounce Italian words. According to Giuliana Artom Treves, an expert of this phenomenon, “English was a term applied to every foreigner who came to Florence. ‘The English have arrived,’ the porter would say to the hotel manager. ‘But I’m not sure if they are Russian or German.’” On the other hand, didn’t someone write that in the middle of the nineteenth century Anglo-Americans made up a third of all city dwellers?