Eloquent and assured, Mary McCarthy''s The Stones of Florence beckons the reader on a brisk but sweeping tour of the birthplace of the Renaissance and the legendary home of the Medici, Dante, Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and other giants of the age. Her keen observations of this famously alluring city speak to Florence''s persistent character and magnetism-and the attraction it exerted over the first major wave of American tourists to postwar Europe. These essays, which originally appeared in The New Yorker, offer an insightful, mesmerizing look into Florence''s genealogy, archaeology, art, culture, and political life.