Fainting at Paintings
The hidden dangers of Florence’s masterpieces.
Florence is drenched in art. It is on every corner, down every cobbled street, in every piazza and palazzo. Never mind Tony Blair’s genteel “hand of history” on your shoulder. In this Tuscan city, history pulls you into her arms, kisses you passionately, then swings you around and around until your head spins.
For some people, this is more than a metaphor. The myriad masterpieces in Florence actually make them ill. Symptoms of “Florence Syndrome” include nausea, dizziness, fainting, panic attacks, hyperventilation, tachycardia, temporary amnesia and disorientation. Some hallucinate. Some end up in hospital, literally overwhelmed by beauty.
Despite sounding like something from a romance novel, the psychological disorder is an actual thing, documented, and with the victims to prove it.
The most famous sufferer to detail his symptoms was French writer Marie-Henri Beyle, better known as Stendhal. A lifelong Italophile, he visited Florence in 1817. On Friday, 17th January (the Italian equivalent of Friday the 13th), he went to the largest Franciscan church in the world, the Basilica di Santa Croce, to admire the Giotto frescoes and numerous monuments commemorating important Italians over the centuries. He relates what happened next in his book Naples and…
