It is early morning and the Piazza della Signoria is already teaming with tourists and their umbrella-holding guides, lending the city of Florence the aspect of a vast, open-air theme park.
A select few file past the world's most violent classical statues – The Rape of the Sabine Women, Perseus with the Head of Medusa – before ducking into the secret passages of the Palazzo Vecchio, chambers where prominent members of the Medici family could spy on rivals, overlooked by a second tier of hidden panels and spy-holes.
This lesser-spotted Florence made an impression on novelist Dan Brown, who made use of the city's clandestine corridors and peekaboo architecture in his 2013 thriller Inferno.
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“That’s my job,” he smiles. “You take a tonne of science. You take some sort of ethical dilemma. Say a little question like: should we kill half the people on Earth to try to save the human race? And then fold in this whole world of art and architecture and history. And then you have to start cutting scenes that you love but that don’t serve the story. It takes a whole lot of drafts.”
Today, Brown (52) is in the Boboli Gardens watching actors Tom Hanks and Felicity Jones run repeatedly down a flight of steps. We're on the set of Inferno, the third film (following on from the billion-dollar-grossing The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons) to star Hanks as Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon.
Even 15 takes in, Brown watches with the same look of delight and awe as the tourists who have wandered into a Florentine garden only to discover that they are slap-bang in the middle of a new film from director Ron Howard.
“I come here as a spectator rather than a babysitter,” Brown says. “I’m fortunate to work with the best in the business. I can just hand it over and know that whatever decisions need to be made are being made by very, very talented people. I’ve been able to exhale: let it go.”
Vanilla writing
It is not uncommon for populist writers to be rather less popular among literary critics. Few writers, however, attract quite as many brickbats as Brown, whose blockbuster novels – 200 million sold and counting – have been repeatedly trashed as “vanilla”, “ungrammatical” and “repetitive”.
“You know what? Everybody has different tastes,” he says cheerfully. “Some critics love what I do and some critics hate what I do. Same with the readers. That’s the beauty of literature. If you don’t like what I do, there are a million other books out there for you.
“It’s funny. When I first started out writing, like all young artists who are critiqued, it hurt. You want everyone to love what you do. But that’s just not how it works. And at some point you realise: I’m just going to write the book that I want to read. And I hope some people share my tastes. I can’t expect everyone to like what I do.”
He is equally magnanimous about those who accuse him of anti-Catholic or anti-Christian sentiment.
“Controversy is just a loaded word for debate,” he insists. “And debate and discussion is how we learn. So when people say there’s controversy about Mary Magdalene and Jesus or antimatter, then great. Because at least people are talking about important topics.
“My books are not message books. Whether or not you believe Jesus was married is irrelevant. For me, the version of the story I told makes more sense to me than the version they taught me in Sunday school. But if somebody has their Christian faith shaken to the core from reading that idea in my novel, then maybe they need to look at their Christian faith.”
He says he was not bothered by the criticism around his portrayal of Opus Dei, the somewhat peculiar institution of the Catholic Church founded in Spain in 1928.
"I always felt that I had painted a very fair portrait of Opus Dei. Because Opus Dei in The Da Vinci Code is a group that takes in Silas, this battered soul with nowhere to go. In that way they are shown as benevolent. Simultaneously, they have many practices, like corporeal mortification, that made modern readers think 'whoa'. But I didn't make that up. That's their way of doing penance.
“I did say a lot of not-so-nice things about them that were true. I said they stole people’s money. So they wrote a letter to my attorney complaining that Dan Brown made a mistake when writing about us. He said the entrance to our building in New York is on 46th Street. It’s on 47th Street.”
Polite and passionate
I suspect even Brown’s harshest detractors would feel rather bad if they actually bumped into the man. A neat, precise New Hampshirite, he’s unfailingly polite (“Thank you for that question” is something of a refrain) and genuinely passionate about the topics explored in his work.
"If you do the research on overpopulation, it's absolutely terrifying," he says, recounting one of Inferno's central themes. "Eighty years ago there were one-third as many people as there are now. So in 80 years the population had tripled. It's astonishing. And if you look at the science of pollution, ozone depletion, starvation: all of these things are all tied to overpopulation.
“This is of a great concern to me, and really should be to everybody. I do hope to get that message across on some level.”
When Brown talks about Dante, he could be mistaken for Comic-Con fanboy.
"I first read The Divine Comedy in high school and then again in university," he says, excitedly. "I just loved it. It has such a contemporary feel, especially for something written in the 13th century. People forget that the Bible says almost nothing about hell. Our vision of hell was created by Dante Alighieri.
“I think I’ve always known – certainly since I started writing the Langdon books – that I would one day get around to writing about the Inferno. It was only when I considered Dante as prophesy that I found a way to bring him into the modern world of genetic engineering.”
Brown created Robert Langdon as an amalgamation of his favourite professors from alma maters Amherst College and the University of Seville, as well as an homage to his father, Richard G Brown, a maths teacher and high-school textbook author.
“The greatest heroes in my life were teachers,” he says. “They call it the noblest profession for a reason. When we first started talking about making movies, we had a tongue-in-cheek conversation. He can’t become skilled in martial arts or suddenly develop X-ray vision. If he gets in a bind, he can’t pull out a gun or use jiu-jitsu. Because how fun is it to watch a teacher save the world rather than Superman?”
Success story
Brown's writing career was kick-started by reading a copy of Sidney Sheldon's Doomsday Conspiracy, which he found on the beach during on a 1993 holiday in Tahiti. That random acquisition is typical in the story of any successful author, he says.
"I think success in any field requires hard work. But there's always an element of luck. That's what happened with The Da Vinci Code. I just wrote the right book at the right moment. If it came out now or 30 years ago I don't know that it would have had the same success. But it came out at a moment when people were questioning the church, when people were questioning authority."
Inferno is the fourth novel to feature Robert Langdon, following on from Angels & Demons (2000), The Da Vinci Code (2003), and The Lost Symbol (2009). A film of the latter was reportedly in preproduction as long ago as 2013, yet Inferno is reaching cinemas first. What gives?
"Inferno is a more cinematic, international picture," says Brown. "The Lost Symbol is set in Washington DC, and that's a great setting, but it is one setting. Inferno visits three different cities. I completely understood the decision."
Entering the movie-making business, even by default, has made little dent in how Brown approaches his trade. He studies and writes every morning, then plays the piano for half an hour. (He was a composer and singer-songwriter for more than a decade before he began writing fiction.) When he is researching, he seeks out experts and academics: “You somehow learn more from people than from books.”
“I’m surprised the movies haven’t changed things,” Brown says. “I guess it has to do with the fact that I started the books long before the movies existed. I’ve spent so much time in my head with these characters and so little time on movie sets. When I go back to Langdon, he’s still Langdon. He’s still the character that has allowed me to explore all these different interests.
“I’m very grateful for it. I’ll never take it for granted.”
Inferno opens on October 14th.
