The Florentine scenes in E. M. Forster’s 1909 novel A Room with a View evoke the varied attitudes of English tourists and residents to Italian landscapes and pictures. Miss Lavish famously despises the use of guidebooks and declares herself anti-Baedeker: ‘The true Italy is only to be found by patient observation.’ Lucy purchases photographs of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Giorgione’s Tempesta from Alinari’s photography shop. There are street vendors of panoramic photographs. Some English visitors found the Tuscan countryside overly cultivated. Lilia, who shocked her family by marrying an Italian in Forster’s earlier novel Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), mused on the ‘vast slopes of olives and vineyards, with chalk-white farms, and in the distance other slopes, with more olives and more farms’, stating ‘I don’t call this country.’ The narrator notes ‘And indeed, there was scarcely a touch of wildness in it – some of those slopes had been under cultivation for two thousand years.’

Art history flourished in Florence and northern Italy in the Edwardian period and Forster incorporated tourist interpretations of art as devices in several novels. In his long-unpublished story Arctic Summer (c. 1911) three English tourists take a taxi from Milan to a barely disguised Malpaga Castle to visit, in the words of John Addington Symonds (1898), ‘ancient state rooms’ that were ‘brilliant with frescoes’ depicting the life of Bartolomeo Colleoni. Forster notes ‘The frescoes were of little note artistically and the names of the painters … had only been unearthed by recent research.’ This meant that ‘an earnest tourist’ could be ‘tiresome, for it was possible to distinguish between one painter and another from internal evidence.’

In A Room with a View a party of English tourists is led by Mr Eager, a pedantic resident Anglican clergyman with art historical interests, on an excursion through the countryside and hillside above Florence. His aim is to identify the viewpoint used by the Florentine artist Alessio Baldovinetti (1427–1499) some 500 years before. ‘But where exactly had he stood? That was the question which Mr Eager hoped to solve now. And Miss Lavish, whose nature was attracted by anything problematical, had become equally enthusiastic.’