The Florentines

I’ll admit: I approached *The Florentines* wary of another hagiographic ode to the Renaissance. But Strathern’s book is refreshingly *unromantic*. He treats Florence like a living organism—glorious, yes, but also riddled with plague, debt, and the kind of backstabbing that would make *Game of Thrones* blush. The audiobook’s strength lies in how it balances grand themes (the birth of capitalism! the tension between faith and humanism!) with gutter-level details, like the fact that the Medici’s rise hinged on a banking loophole involving wool and papal bribes. Rupert Bush’s narration is a masterclass in restraint: he never over-dramatizes, letting Strathern’s razor-sharp prose do the work. His slightly nasal, patrician tone might not suit everyone, but it fits the material—like a scholar smirking at humanity’s folly. That said, this isn’t a breezy listen. The middle act sags under the weight of genealogical tangents (do we *really* need another branch of the Strozzi family tree?), and Bush’s pacing occasionally feels too measured for the book’s more cinematic moments, like the Bonfire of the Vanities or Savonarola’s fall. The production is clean but unremarkable—no immersive soundscapes here, just straightforward narration. Yet when Strathern zooms in on a figure like Lorenzo de’ Medici, balancing ledgers in one hand and poetry commissions in the other, the audiobook crackles. It’s a warts-and-all love letter to a city that invented both beauty and brutality—and if you’ve ever stood in the Piazza della Signoria and wondered how such a small place could change the world, this will answer you, in all its messy glory.