Dolce Via: Rome in the 80s

There is a key moment near the start of A Room with a View, E.M. Forster’s romance set in Florence, where the young heroine Lucy, on holiday to see the highlights of antiquity, witnesses a murder in the Piazza Signoria. It is a graphic scene, as violence and blood floods into the ordered, sanitised Florence that has been sternly imposed on her; where the world of marble and measured beauty suddenly morphs into one of hum...