In the days before I departed for Europe, Italy was all over the news, with common themes of discord, tumult, corruption, confrontation. Rome was drowning in traffic and street crime; Naples was drowning in garbage; Venice was just plain drowning. This was the reality of modern life. The Italy of tourist daydreams was now located somewhere between Atlantis and Oz, a lost land of wistful fantasy.

 In Arthur’s day, apparently, it had all been true. “A vast number of Americans saw ‘La Dolce Vita’ and have ached to get here ever since. They won’t be disappointed,” he says, and his chapters on Venice and Florence carry the same sentiment: Hollywood was right. Sun-dappled rolling hills! Renaissance statues in every piazza! Simple-but-wise peasants offering you wine and pasta!

But I knew better. Those rolling hills would now be porcupined with cell phone towers, the piazzas crammed with corpulent tourists pushing past buskers screeching dated pop songs, the statues usurped by fiberglass replicas (with missing limbs magically reattached), the charming peasants replaced by pickpockets and aggressive souvenir hawkers, the pasta tasting suspiciously like it had been prepared by Signore Spaghetti-O.

So what the hell was going on, I wondered, as I peered out the window of the bus from the Pisa airport to Florence and saw a place that was just . . . just . . . so oh-my-God charming, so freaking Italian. The people, the landscape, the architecture: everything fit the stereotypical representations of Hollywood, tourist brochures, and other purveyors of fantasies and half-truths. It was, as Frommer suggested, a “fantastic dream.”

Confession: I am a reluctant yuppie. And as such, I have consumed my share of foofy olive oil and inexpensive-yet-pretentious wine, meaning I have seen a lot of bottle labels featuring drawings of undulating hills and assorted Tuscan vistas. Well, this landscape looked exactly like the labels. And those cute little houses in the Tuscan Villa style were actual, well, you know, Tuscan villas, in all their authentic, charmingly rustic, picturesquely crumbling glory, with wood-burning ovens outside puffing quaint little plumes of smoke, and queues of endearingly gnarled olive trees marching insouciantly to the horizon. Old women with walking sticks hobbled regally by the side of the road. The famously manic Italian driving was on full display, with scooter drivers zigzagging through traffic like so many Prada-clad mosquitoes. Even the sky seemed art directed: a dome of piercing cerulean perfectly complementing the deep green of the rolling hills and interrupted periodically by pert cotton ball clouds. It was postcard-perfect, as though contrived by the local tourism board—“Giovanni, here they come! Go drive past them on your Vespa! Carmela, hide the satellite dish and put your delightfully scruffy goats out in the field! Quickly! Prego. Ciao.”

It was charming to the point of creepiness, my amazement sporadically edging toward disbelief and paranoia. Frommer starts the Florence chapter by claiming that “this is a city for reflection.” To which I say: nuh-uh. At least not at first. While it’s true that my more contemplative side would eventually struggle to the surface, it turns out that my initial reaction to such stunning sights is not rumination but blissed-out gaping. To wit: here and there, I spotted the expected trappings of twenty-first century life—anti-immigrant graffiti, dreary industrial sites, goat herders talking on cell phones, ads for American corporations—but my brain had already become so thoroughly re-wired, so taken with the soma of stereotypes fulfilled, that every time the trenchant, sarcastic internal monologue began, the giddy, altered-state tourist immediately drowned it out: “HOLY CRAP, LOOK AT THAT ADORABLE LITTLE OLD MAN IN THAT ABSURDLY LUSH VINEYARD—WHERE’S MY CAMERA?!”

When the bus rolled into Florence’s historic city center, the authenticity high turned into an enrapturing overdose at the up-close sight of the winding cobblestoned passageways encroached by ineffably Old World architecture: arched doorways, elaborate cornices and corbels, massive shutters, and, on every wall, the perfect amber-hued, slightly-cracking faux finish—er, wait, no, not faux. It brought to mind every example of fake Tuscan architecture I’d seen before at the Olive Garden and other cheesy restaurants, in interior design magazines, in countless places.

Florence somehow conformed even to expectations and archetypes I had not previously formulated in my mind but which became manifest as soon as I saw them in front of me: the history-of-a-culture tableau of runway-worthy outfits drying on ornate wrought iron balcony railings; the precise carefree manner of the high-heeled, black-clad woman pedaling a rickety bicycle while talking on a tiny, sleek cell phone and smoking and gesturing wildly.

In Travels in Hyperreality, the Italian writer Umberto Eco notes that “the pleasure of imitation, as the ancients knew, is one of the most innate in the human spirit; but here we not only enjoy a perfect imitation, we also enjoy the conviction that the imitation has reached its apex and afterwards reality will always be inferior to it.” Eco was speaking of Americans’ love of themed environments such as Disneyland, but I can’t help but wonder if Florence provided a corollary argument, that once an imitation has seemingly established the apex of perfection, any reality that exceeds it can’t help but seem fake itself. This was authentic-plus-one.