Crowned Europe’s Best City of 2025, Florence has it all: stunning art and architecture made by the world’s greatest Renaissance masters, an idyllic subtropical climate perfect for basking in the Tuscan sun… and strangers hallucinating, fainting, and kissing each other.
Why, you ask? Blame it on “Florence syndrome,” or Stendhal syndrome, a phenomenon in which art or beauty so overwhelms a viewer that they experience psychosomatic symptoms from an increased heart rate to dizzy spells. Florence, it seems, is ground zero for the syndrome, due to its unrivaled concentration of artistic treasures. Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (c. 1485), for one, has proved particularly potent.
The syndrome was named after 19th-century novelist Marie-Henri Beyle, known by his pen name “Stendhal.” In his 1817 book Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio, Stendhal recounted his experience of visiting Florence’s Basilica of Santa Croce, the burial place of a number of his personal heroes, Michelangelo, Galileo, and Machiavelli. “I was in a sort of ecstasy,” he wrote. “Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty… I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations… Everything spoke so vividly to my soul.”
But this divine overwhelm wasn’t without worrying physical symptoms: “I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they call ‘nerves’… I walked with the fear of falling.”
