By Corrado Augias
One among Italy's best-known writers takes a Grand travel via her towns, heritage, and literature looking for the genuine 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, renowned and reviled, a rustic that has guarded her secrets and techniques and confounded outsiders. Now, whilst this "Italian paradox" is extra obvious than ever, cultural authority Corrado Augias poses the perplexing questions: how did it get this manner? How can this peninsula be at the same time the house of geniuses and criminals, the cradle of attractiveness and the butt of jokes?
An immediate number 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 visible from the surface and from the interior, he weaves a geo-historical narrative, passing via primary towns and rereading the classics and the biographies of the folks that experience, for higher or worse, made Italians who they're. From the gloomy surroundings of Cagliostro's Palermo to the dependent courtroom of Maria Luigia in Parma, from the ghetto of Venice to the heroic Neapolitan rebellion opposed to the Nazis, Augias sheds gentle 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 reminiscence.
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Additional info for The Secrets of Italy: People, Places, and Hidden Histories
Sample text
7 The work of poet and essayist Giacomo Leopardi fits this idea perfectly, as we shall see in the chapter on Rome. He traveled a lot despite his poor health, and was tossed about in unbelievably uncomfortable horse-drawn carriages on abominably rough roads for days on end. In his travels he’s accompanied by a deep discontent for which he knew only one remedy. On July 23, 1827, he writes: After changing my place of residence many times and staying here or there for different periods of time, either months or years, I noticed that I was never happy, never centered within myself, never at home in any place, however excellent it might otherwise be, until I had memories to attach to that place, to the rooms where I lived, to the streets, to the houses I visited.
It’s an emotional stroke of genius. I even remember, if memory serves, hearing sobs rise up in the dark theater from the distressed, disillusioned audience as the carriage began rolling away. All in all, it’s a singular book with rich emotional content and a fairly innovative structure, when compared with standard late nineteenth-century literary canons. De Amicis was a lot less naive than we naive readers might think—indeed, he knew exactly what he was going for. First, to push us to tears, something he certainly succeeded at in my case.
In a December 1821 letter to publisher John Murray, Byron writes: I have got here into a famous old feudal palazzo, on the Arno, large enough for a garrison, with dungeons below and cells in the walls, and so full of Ghosts, that the learned Fletcher (my valet) has begged leave to change his room, and then refused to occupy his new room, because there were more ghosts there than in the other. 1 Aside from the supposed ghosts lurking in Byron’s palazzo, there’s another ghost that’s long haunted, and continues to haunt, Italians’ consciences: the way that they, as a people, might be judged from the outside—the way foreigners might think of them and describe them.