The English Cemetery is the strangest beautiful thing in Florence: a mound of cypresses and Victorian tombs stranded on a traffic island, where the ring road splits and rejoins around the city's romantic dead. It was the edge of town in 1827; the boulevard of the 1860s marooned it, and the marooning is what makes it.
Cross into Piazzale Donatello at the lights and through the gate of the Cimitero degli Inglesi — a donation, then up the cypress avenue. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is the pilgrimage: she eloped here, died here in 1861, and lies under a tomb Frederic Leighton designed. Robert never came back. The poet Arthur Hugh Clough is here too, and the sculptor Hiram Powers, and the whole mound is the quietest green in the city precisely because it's ringed by the loudest road.
Come down and walk Borgo Pinti south — palazzo doorways, a Perugino fresco hidden in a convent partway along — into the living city. End in Piazza Sant'Ambrogio, a square full of people buying lunch. From the dead poets to the market in twenty minutes; have a coffee on it.
