It is best known today for partly inspiring the 1959 Walt Disney Productions film The Shaggy Dog as well as its sequels and remakes.

The Hound of Florence is an adventure story for young readers, set in early eighteenth-century Austria and Italy.

The adolescent Lukas Grassi has lost his parents and lives in Vienna in great poverty, longs for his native Italy, and would like to study art in Florence.

The German-language version ends in tragedy: the archduke stabs the dog to death with a dagger, killing Lukas, and his body is disposed of.

There are no chapter divisions, but the 1920s German-language editions, set in Fraktur, use an embellished dash to divide the text into large sections.

[9] In the German-language area, The Hound of Florence was Salten’s second biggest success, only surpassed by Bambi, with three editions (1923, 1928, 1944) during the lifetime of the author, and several reprints since then.