On this day in 2013, I am launching Florence in Peril, 47 years after its Venetian equivalent. Venice in Peril was founded to protect the Pearl of the Adriatic from the dangerously rising waters of the lagoon, toxically mixed with bureaucratic incompetence.

Florence in Peril is founded to save the City of the Flowers from a rising tide of gross and imbecilic tourism, also facilitated by local administrative muddle and an extra-virgin drizzle of greed. We need to get Florence (and Venice) sorted out before they sink. Delicate and evanescent beauty will otherwise eventually succumb to the vile and barbarous beast of mass tourism.

Criticism of visiting Florence may be unseemly from an Englishman, but then we are a nation of hypocrites. Still, the English have always had a passionate special relationship with this most gentlemanly and beautiful, if dour, of all cities. Indeed, at one point in the late 19th century, it was estimated that 100,000 anglophones – artistic and literary Brits and Americans – lived here.

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