Having recently been to Florence, I took the opportunity on a sunny afternoon to sit in the garden and read E. M. Forster's A Room with a View. I watched the film again the night before I went away, and I'm glad to say that it's very faithful to the book. That's quite remarkable, especially for a novel of that period (early 1900s).
    Usually, novels have to be pared down for the screen, but Merchant-Ivory's adaptation has kept every character and scene. Practically every line of dialogue in the novel is in the film. Forster has not indulged in any authorial digressions for moralising, he has avoided purple prose descriptions and he has not gone in for stylistic experiments. He could almost have written A Room with a View with film in mind. The result is that the film captures perfectly the spirit of the book, and the book captures perfectly the spirit of Florence.
    Here are a few of my favourite quotes:
   
    "Over such trivialities as these many a valuable hour may slip away, and the traveller who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or the corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it."

    "One doesn't come to Italy for niceness... one comes for life."

    "Then the pernicious charm of Italy worked on her, and, instead of acquiring information, she began to be happy."