florio's

Updated: June 19, 2025

There can be no difference of opinion about the excellence of the cuisine, or about the reasonable charges of this trattoria. A soup of lentils, followed by boiled turbot or fried soles, beef-steak or mutton cutlets, tordi or beccafichi, with a salad, the whole enlivened with good red wine or Florio's Sicilian Marsala from the cask, costs about four francs. Gas is unknown in the establishment.

John Addington Symonds - New Italian sketches

Although Shakspeare must have studied Plutarch carefully, inasmuch as he copied from him freely, even to his very words, it is remarkable that Montaigne is the only book which we certainly know to have been in the poet's library; one of Shakspeare's existing autographs having been found in a copy of Florio's translation of 'The Essays, which also contains, on the flyleaf, the autograph of Ben Jonson.

Samuel Smiles - Character