
By Corrado Augias
One of Italy's best-known writers takes a Grand journey via her towns, heritage, and literature looking for the real personality of this contradictory country. there's Michelangelo, but additionally the mafia. Pavarotti, but additionally Berlusconi. The debonair Milanese, but in addition the notorious captain of the Costa Concordia cruise send. this is often Italy, favorite and reviled, a rustic that has guarded her secrets and techniques and confounded outsiders. Now, whilst this "Italian paradox" is extra glaring than ever, cultural authority Corrado Augias poses the difficult questions: how did it get this manner? How can this peninsula be concurrently the house of geniuses and criminals, the cradle of good looks and the butt of jokes?
An fast no 1 bestseller in Italy, Augias's newest units out to rediscover the story-different from the history-of this kingdom. starting with how Italy is noticeable from the skin and from the interior, he weaves a geo-historical narrative, passing via significant towns and rereading the classics and the biographies of the folks that experience, for greater or worse, made Italians who they're. From the gloomy surroundings of Cagliostro's Palermo to the stylish courtroom of Maria Luigia in Parma, from the ghetto of Venice to the heroic Neapolitan rebellion opposed to the Nazis, Augias sheds mild at the Italian personality, explaining it to outsiders and to Italians themselves. the result's a "novel of a nation," whose protagonists are either the figures we all know from historical past and literature and characters lengthy hidden among the cracks of old narrative and memory.
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