Fawning over Florence's librerias and bibliotecas

For the first two weeks of June, my husband, kids, and I indulged in a fantasy – that we were four Florentine people, just living our ordinary lives in one of Italy’s most beautiful cities.

If you squinted, the fantasy felt real. The university I teach at part-time has a Florence outpost – a far cry from its windswept main campus on a cliff overlooking the Hudson River – and I’d been awarded a summer teaching fellowship that included the use of an apartment in the Palazzo Le Monnier, a former publishing house with past owners that include both the Pucci and the Modigliani families. So the fantasy involved sleeping beneath soaring frescos and practicing our Italian by shouting “Ciao!” at the top of our lungs from one of the apartment’s four (four!) Juliet balconies. We unpacked our belongings into ancient creaking wardrobes that evoked Beauty and the Beast, took refuge from the heat by lying on cool terrazzo floors, ate gelato at least once a day, and pretended we never had to go home.

The fantasy also included being within walking distance of several bowl-you-over beautiful bookstores and libraries. The most gleaming and gilded among them – Biblioteca Marucelliana and Biblioteca Moreniana – were literally just down the street. This added to the surreality of the whole experience, to be like “Oh yeah this Medici-built masterpiece is just my local library.” Like it’s nothing. We had to travel a few minutes further – south near the Duomo where the city center gets choked with tourists – to get to a great children’s library, the Biblioteca della Oblate. “The library is new,” the person at the front desk told us. “It opened in 2007.” Sure, but the building’s been around since the 14th century, when it served as a convent, and it’s capital-g gorgeous.

We were similarly enamored by the city’s bookstores. I listened to live music at La Cite, sipping a glass of wine while the people at the table next to me played a raucous game of Risk. I took work calls from the sun-drenched back terrace of Libri Liberi, a bookstore, cafe, and gallery space a few doors down from our apartment that one of my Marist students recommended. The boys and I both adored stylish Todo Modo, with its under-the-stairs children’s nook, perfect Parisian-style croissants, and big selection of English-language books. And though both Brac and Giunti Odeon were the site of some serious exhausted-children tantrums, they were both perfect too: one a bookstores slash restaurant, the other a bookstore slash theater. I also spent time at Libreria Alfani, Libreria Ginori, Libreria Pirola and, on one particularly shoppy day, the bookstore at Palazzo Gucci. Each one of them was so beautiful.

In classic Florence fashion, your eye gets used to that beauty after a while. Beautiful becomes the baseline, in a way that feels particularly cruel now that the fantasy is over and we’re back among the brutalist buildings of Roosevelt Island. No amount of squinting here in NYC can make our local library look like the Biblioteca Moreniana, but at least we’ll always have the photos. And the broken Italian we picked up along the way. Arrivederci, Florence.