Italy

Everyone knows Italy. Almost nobody knows what it is.

It is a pier: seven hundred and fifty miles of land thrust into the middle of the most travelled sea on earth, with an island at its foot close enough to Africa to see the light on it. That position guaranteed that everyone would come: Greeks to Syracuse, Arabs to Palermo, Normans, Spaniards, Austrians, and the boats still arriving at Lampedusa this morning. And the mountains behind every landing beach guaranteed that none of it would mix.

So the arrivals stayed exactly where they came ashore, and hardened into places with their own languages, their own bread, their own saints, and their own opinion of the next valley. Then, in 1861, later than the founding of the United States, somebody drew a line round the lot and called it a country.

Atlas Greaves travels it end to end, and finds the line is the newest thing on the map. The fifth volume of The Far Countries: eight chapters, one argument, and a country that was never one country.