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7 Books to Understand Italy’s Turbulent History
Italian writer Carlo Levi, author of Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945), described Italy as “a great, mythological artichoke” made by multiple layers that lead on “a difficult journey through space and across time.” This article aims to guide the reader through some of these layers with the assistance of a series of seven books that cover different periods of Italian history, from the Middle Ages to World War II. From Dante’s Commedia to Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, the seven books offer a diverse array of perspectives on Italy and its tortuous history.
1. The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri (ca. 1308-1321)
Dante Alighieri, detail from Luca Signorelli fresco in the Cappella di San Brizio, ca. 1499-1502. Source: Wikimedia Commons / Cappella di San Brizio, Orvieto, Italy
“When I had journeyed half of our life’s way/ I found myself within a shadowed forest/ for I had lost the path that does not stray.” Hardly any Italian student won’t instantly recognize the first three verses of Dante’s La Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy), perhaps the most widely known incipit in Italian literature.
Written between 1308 and 1321, the Commedia is not only a landmark of medieval literature but also a comprehensive analysis of 14th-century Italy. After all, Dante Alighieri, born in Florence in 1265, was actively involved in the ever-shifting political landscape of the Italian peninsula, where different powers—the city-states, the papacy, and the Holy Roman Empire—fought for dominance and control.
In the sixth canto of the Purgatorio, Dante bemoans Italy’s political and moral crisis, where internal divisions had weakened the city-states, leading to corruption and a lack of political agency: “Ah, abject Italy, you inn of sorrows/ you ship without a helmsman in harsh seas/ no queen of provinces but of bordellos!”
Dante and the Three Kingdoms, by Domenico Di Michelino, 1465. Source: Wikimedia Commons
In the 13th and 14th centuries, the antagonism wreaking havoc in most Italian city-states stemmed from the rivalry between two political factions: the Guelfi (Guelfs), supporting the papacy, and the Ghibellini (Ghibellines), the emperor’s partisans. In the 1290s, when Dante began his political career, the Guelfs controlled the Florentine government, having defeated the Ghibellines at Benevento in 1266. The ruling elite, however, was split into two parties, the Bianchi (Whites), to which Dante belonged, and the Neri (Blacks), who favored Pope Boniface VIII’s involvement in Florentine politics.
In 1302, after an alliance between the pope, Charles of Valois, and the Black Guelfs overthrew the Whites, Dante was falsely accused of corruption and condemned to death in absentia. He would never return to Florence again. In the Commedia, the poet condemns the political practices of his time and denounces the papacy’s involvement in temporal matters as the source of moral bankruptcy.
His dream of a universal monarch dealing with earthly concerns while leaving spiritual matters to the pope, however, would never come to fruition. In 1313, when Dante died in Ravenna, the Italian peninsula was still much affected by internal divisions.
2. Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio (ca. 1349-1353)
The Decameron, by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, 1837. Source: Wikimedia Commons / Liechtenstein Museum, Liechtenstein
While Dante was a concerned witness to the political turmoil of his time, he also believed earthly events happened according to a preordained fate, an inscrutable master plan of divine providence. In his Decameron, written in the second half of the 14th century, Giovanni Boccaccio offers a significantly different perspective on the concepts of change and fortune, spearheading the humanism of the Renaissance.
The son of a wealthy Florentine merchant, Boccaccio belonged to the merchant class, a group playing an increasingly influential role in the social fabric of the time. No longer condemning the merchants’ business acumen as sinful greed, Boccaccio, on the contrary, praises their industria (ingenuity) in the face of change and adverse fortune.
Correspondingly, while God is still very much present in Boccaccio’s worldview, his concept of fortune is much more “materialistic,” emphasizing both the irrationality of the world and the importance for industrious men and women to seize all given opportunities to make their own fortune. The Decameron’s focus on perceived reality rather than divine providence laid the foundations for Western realism and the Italian humanist movement’s emphasis on human ingenuity.
“Umana cosa è” (It is a human thing), writes Boccaccio in the prologue, setting the tone for the 100 stories told by the ten young people who fled from Florence to the nearby Fiesole as the Black Death spread across Tuscany. From bawdy tales of love and deceit to stories of triumph over adversities, each novella offers an unprejudiced analysis of human experience, celebrating humankind’s resilience and capacity for knowledge.
3. The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli (1513)
Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli, by Santi di Tito, ca. 1550-1600. Source: Wikimedia Commons / Palazzo Vecchio, Florence
The struggle between human ingenuity (virtù) and fortuna (fortune) is also a key motif in Niccolò Machiavelli’s most influential political work, Il Principe (The Prince). Written more than a century and a half after the Decameron, Machiavelli’s treatise portrays fortuna as a malevolent force that randomly wreaks havoc on humanity.
Faced with constant uncertainty and looming threats, a good prince can only rely on his virtù to rule effectively. Separating politics from morality and the “effectual truth” from “what should be done,” Machiavelli argues that an effective ruler must be able to adapt quickly to the shifting circumstances, knowing when to be calculative and ruthless.
The ability to adapt to swift changes was undoubtedly a useful tool to navigate the unstable political landscape of Renaissance Italy, where one’s fortune could change quickly. Machiavelli himself, as an active player in Florentine politics, fell victim to the volatile power dynamics of his time. When Giovanni de’ Medici (the future Pope Leo X) reinstated his family’s rule in Florence in 1512, Machiavelli was falsely accused of conspiracy and even tortured and exiled.
He eventually managed to return to his beloved city, but when the Medicis were expelled from Florence after Charles V’s sack of Rome in 1527, his involvement with the Medicean regime once again cast suspicions upon him. Similarly to Dante, Machiavelli lamented the rivalry between the Italian regional states, criticizing their political, military, and moral crisis. In the last chapter of The Prince, Machiavelli calls for a “new prince” to “seize Italy and to free her from the barbarians,” acting as a Moses for the disunited Italian peninsula.
4. The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, Ugo Foscolo (1802)
Ugo Foscolo, Italian Poet, by François-Xavier Fabre, 1813. Source: Wikimedia Commons / National Central Library of Florence
In the 1790s, Machiavelli’s wish for unity and independence seemed close to becoming true for many Italian patriots. Among them was Ugo Foscolo, an Italian Romantic poet and writer born in present-day Zakynthos, a Greek island then controlled by the Republic of Venice.
As the ideals of liberty and equality of the French Revolution spread across Europe, a sense of national consciousness began to form across the Italian peninsula, particularly among the middle class, with many calling for independence from foreign control. In 1796 and 1797, when French forces, led by Napoleon Bonaparte, drove the Austrians out of Milan and several cities in present-day Emilia-Romagna, many Italian patriots joined the fight.
However, their hopes for independence were crushed in October 1797, when Napoleon ceded Venetia to the Habsburg Empire by the Treaty of Campoformio. In 1802, Ugo Foscolo, who had served as captain in the Cispadane Republic (later merged into the Cisalpine Republic), expressed the disillusionment and outrage of many Italians in The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis.
An epistolary novel inspired by Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), Foscolo’s work follows the tragic love story between Jacopo, a student and revolutionary, and Teresa against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars. “The sacrifice of our land is complete. All is lost, and life remains to us—if indeed we are allowed to live—only so that we may lament our misfortunes and our shame,” writes Ortis in his famous first letter, a lament for the disappointment at the 1797 treaty between Austria and Napoleon.
5. The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1958)
Burt Lancaster as Don Fabrizio di Salina in a scene from Visconti’s Il gattopardo. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Ugo Foscolo’s vision of a united and independent Italy would become a reality in 1861, when, after three wars, the movement for Italian unification known as the Risorgimento culminated in the creation of the Kingdom of Italy under the leadership of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia and its Savoy dynasty. Nine years later, in 1870, the new Italian state annexed Rome, thus completing the long process of territorial unification.
From the beginning, however, it became clear that transforming the former patchwork of states into a national entity would not be an easy task. As Massimo D’Azeglio famously put it, “We have made Italy, now we must make Italians.” The centralization policy adopted by the first Italian government as a means of nation-building had the reverse effect of widening the economic and cultural divide between the North and South, resulting in the so-called Southern Question and Brigantaggio. Disillusioned with the failed promises of socio-economic equality, the South came to resent the unification and scornfully dubbed it a forced annexation to the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia.
In 1958, Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), an unexpected bestseller, sparked a heated debate in Italy, showing how the Risorgimento remained a controversial question. Written by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, born into the Sicilian aristocracy in 1896, the novel was initially rejected by the leading publishing houses. Criticized for delivering a frontal attack on the Risorgimento, The Leopard revolves around Don Fabrizio, prince of Salina, a Sicilian feudal landowner and a detached but sharp observer of the events following Garibaldi’s Expedition of the Thousand in Sicily.
The Departure of the Garibaldian, by Gerolamo Induno, 1860. Source: Wikimedia Commons / Artgate Fondazione Cariplo, Gallerie d’Italian, Milan
In the key scene of the novel, Don Fabrizio meets Chevalley, a representative of the Savoy government, who wants to offer him a seat in the new kingdom’s parliament and, in a revealing slip of the tongue, describes the merger of Sicily with Piedmont as an “annexation.” Don Fabrizio declines the offer, urging Chevalley to give the position to Calogero Sedara, a wealthy bourgeois, pessimistically declaring: “We were the leopards, the lions. Those who will take our place will be jackals, hyenas.”
Besides offering a unique perspective on the Italian unification, The Leopard is also a masterful description of the Italian South in all its sensual glory and atavistic sleepiness. The vivid descriptions of the Sicilian landscapes, the luxury of the declining feudal aristocracy, and the poverty of the population are masterfully recreated in Luchino Visconti’s 1963 movie of the same name.
6. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway (1929)
Portrait of Ernest Hemingway in Milan during WWI, 1918. Source: National Archives
In 1918, a young Ernest Hemingway served in World War I in the Italian ambulance service. Wounded in July 1918 at Fossalta di Piave on the Austro-Italian border, he received a war cross from the Italian government. In 1929, he drew on his wartime experience as the basis for the novel A Farewell to Arms, the tragic love story between Frederic Henry, an American ambulance driver on the Italian front, and Catherine Barkley, an English nurse.
A realistic and unromanticized account of World War I, Hemingway’s novel documents the devastating Italian defeat at Caporetto (present-day Kobarid, Slovenia) and the subsequent tragic retreat to the Piave River. War-weary and disillusioned about the outcome of the conflict, the Italian soldiers begin their slow and tortuous retreat in the rain. Confused and fearful of their fate, some throw down their arms, others, panicking, mistakenly fire at their own side.
The Battle of Caporetto, fought between October and November 1917, is one of the most infamous events in Italy’s military history. From 1915 to 1917, General Luigi Cadorna, the chief of staff of the Italian army, launched repeated attacks against the Austrian forces along the Isonzo River along the border between Italy and the Habsburg Empire. Though the Italian troops managed to capture Gorizia in 1916, they failed to penetrate the Austrian sector.
General Luigi Cadorna in uniform, 1917. Source: Wikimedia Commons
On October 24, the German and Austrian forces broke through the Italian lines, crossing the Isonzo and pouring into Caporetto. By November 9, when the Italian troops finally managed to hold the line behind the Piave River, about 300,000 soldiers had died. Some 250,000 were taken prisoner.
Faced with the possibility of a military collapse, General Cadorna blamed some units of the 2nd Army for the disastrous defeat, accusing them of cowardice in the War Bulletin no. 887. Cadorna, however, was heavily criticized for his harsh discipline (in 1916, he introduced decimation as a punishment method), and he was replaced by General Armando Diaz.
Toward the end of 1918, Diaz launched another offensive, scoring a decisive victory at the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, bridging the Piave River and attacking the Austro-Hungarian line. The battle was seen as a form of revenge for Caporetto, whose name remains a synonym for disaster in the Italian language. After the war, the 1918 offensive was celebrated in the song The Legend of the Piave, one of the most famous Italian patriotic songs.
7. Family Sayings, Natalia Ginzburg (1963)
Benito Mussolini in Rome after King Victor Emmanuel III appointed him prime minister, October 30, 1922. Source: Focus
In the negotiations that followed the end of World War I, formalized by the Treaty of Versailles, the Italian delegation failed to secure the desired territorial gains. The disappointment with the postwar settlement gave rise to the narrative of the vittoria mutilata (mutilated victory). Promoted by far-right nationalist groups, the theory of the vittoria mutilata blamed the liberal government for the less-than-favorable outcome and contributed to the rise of Fascism in Italy.
Led by Benito Mussolini, the Fascist Party seized power in October 1922 after the March on Rome. In 1925, having silenced the opposition parties, Mussolini dismantled the liberal state and established the Fascist regime. For the next 20 years, Il Duce ruled the peninsula as a dictator, persecuting political opponents and signing a military alliance with Adolf Hitler. In 1938, the regime introduced the Leggi Razziali (Racial Laws), a series of anti-Semitic laws.
Among those persecuted by the racial laws were Natalia Ginzburg and her relatives. Born Natalia Levi in an Italian-Jewish family in Turin, Ginzburg retraced the dramatic events of the 1930s and World War II in her 1963 Lessico famigliare (Family Sayings).
An ironic but affectionate chronicle of her family’s life, Family Sayings describes Natalia Ginzburg’s daylife in the difficult years of the Fascist regime, describing the death in prison of Natalia’s husband Leone Ginzburg, a leading anti-fascist, and her brothers and friends participation in the Resistenza, the resistance movement against the fascist Republic of Salò, founded by Mussolini in 1943, and the invading German
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