Continuing with our exploration of Florence… We stumbled into this small bookshop in the neighborhood of our hotel (see our earlier post) in the heart of Florence. The bookshop is a part of Teatro Niccolini which is apparently the oldest theatre in Florence.
If you like to join us on this epic road trip from the beginning in Switzerland, click here for the first post of the series.
According to the theatre’s website:
The theatre is located 10 meters from Piazza del Duomo. The theatre’s origin dates back to the mid-seventeenth century, when a group of nobles rented some rooms in Palazzo Ughi in via del Cocomero and built the theater there.
By the way, the usage of the term “bookshop” is British while “bookstore” is American. And “LIBRI” means books in Italian.
The Niccolini Theater reopened in 2016 with alternating genres – theatre, music, dance, children’s theater – all artistic productions in foreign languages, aimed especially at American university students and English-speaking tourists.
On its website… “The Teatro Niccolini hosts a bookshop and a literary café to create a synergy between theater and the world of books, where the “recited” word relates to the “written” word and vice versa.”
The ceiling of the bookshop is decorated with motifs and drawings in the style of the ceiling of the Uffizi Gallery.
The bookshop sells a good selection of English language books that are all associated somehow with Tuscany, the city of Florence, the Renaissance era, or famous Italian / Florentine residents throughout history.
While writing this blog at home, we noticed that among the books shown in the photos above, we actually bought one of them – “Uffizi Gallery: Art, History, Collections”. We also purchased a few other books – one about the masterpieces of early scientific equipment from the Museo Galileo, and one that focuses on da Vinci’s books – “Leonardo and His Books: The Library of the Universal Genius”. The small book is a fun, gossipy read on Florentine lore and urban legends – “Strolling Through Florence”.
Interestingly, three out of these four books are published by Giunti Editore. The quality of the paper, printing and binding is of the highest quality. According to the publisher’s website, which tells a wonderful story about its history, Giunti Editore is a Florentine publishing house – successor to a long publishing tradition that began in 1841 with the founding of the Paggi typography and publishing bookshop. It has a large catalog of over 14,500 active titles with more than 1,000 new entries a year.
Back to the bookshop …
Touristy and schorlarly books aside, we spotted literary fictions by Umberto Eco (The Island of the Day Before), Elena Ferrante (My Brilliant Friend) and Italo Calvino (Italian Folktales) translated into English on this table, as well as popular fictions such as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.
Some Italian books were also displayed at the bookshop – including an Italian translation of “A Little History of Science” (Breve Storia della Nuova Scienza) by William Bynum.
If you are visiting Florence, pop in here and find a book to read in situ that will enrich your visit, and it will become a souvenir when you return home. I(Chris) will try to do on our next trip.
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As some of our readers may know, I (Chris) love visiting bookshops/bookstores wherever he goes. If you are curious to see the other 20-plus bookstores around the world on this blog – just search by the tag “bookstore” below.