Thursday, April 02, 2015

The top 10 books about Italy

The Guardian’s correspondent chooses books from Goethe to Michael Dibdin which reveal an ‘eternally deceptive’ country

the Roman Colosseum by night.
Less familiar than we assume ... Rome’s Colosseum by night. Photograph: Stephen Woods / Alamy/Alamy
Italy may seem like the most European of countries. Its capital was that of an empire that encompassed all but the remotest corners of the continent. Italy gave us the Renaissance and the foundations of modern western culture. Rome was the city chosen for the signing of the European Union’s founding treaty.

A lot of outsiders – content to visit its museums, to holiday in placid Umbria and cultured Tuscany – are happy to leave it at that. Yet there are parts of Italy and aspects of its society that are as exotic and unfamiliar as if they came from the Middle or Far East.

Where else in Europe do you find an organised crime syndicate like the ‘ndrangheta, which uses rites that are grotesque parodies of Roman Catholic liturgy? Or a town such as Matera where, until the 1950s, much of the population lived in caves? Or a dish like pajata, made from the only partially cleaned intestines of milk-fed calves? Where but in Italy could an entire sentence-worth of meaning be conveyed with a single hand gesture?

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