The Pursuit of Italy
A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples
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- 115,00 kr
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- 115,00 kr
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One of The Economist's Books of the Year
A provocative, entertaining account of Italy's diverse riches, its hopes and dreams, its past and present
Did Garibaldi do Italy a disservice when he helped its disparate parts achieve unity? Was the goal of political unification a mistake? The question is asked and answered in a number of ways in The Pursuit of Italy, an engaging, original consideration of the many histories that contribute to the brilliance—and weakness—of Italy today.
David Gilmour's wonderfully readable exploration of Italian life over the centuries is filled with provocative anecdotes as well as personal observations, and is peopled by the great figures of the Italian past—from Cicero and Virgil to the controversial politicians of the twentieth century. His wise account of the Risorgimento debunks the nationalistic myths that surround it, though he paints a sympathetic portrait of Giuseppe Verdi, a beloved hero of the era.
Gilmour shows that the glory of Italy has always lain in its regions, with their distinctive art, civic cultures, identities, and cuisines. Italy's inhabitants identified themselves not as Italians but as Tuscans and Venetians, Sicilians and Lombards, Neapolitans and Genoese. Italy's strength and culture still come from its regions rather than from its misconceived, mishandled notion of a unified nation.
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By 1861, the Kingdom of Italy was formally proclaimed, and it included the territories of Parma, Modena, Tuscany, most of Lombardy, most of the Papal States, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Yet, as acclaimed historian Gilmour points out in this absorbing history , many individuals living in the various regions of the new nation regarded unification with suspicion and continued to think of themselves as Tuscans or Sicilians or Neapolitans or Venetians. In captivating prose, Gilmour chronicles the history of Italy by exploring the many Italies that compose the peninsula. For example, Virgil believed that the country was a place of extraordinary diversity, but that its strength lay in unity in diversity; for him, Roman Italy was not a glorified city-state but an entity that resembled a nation, a territory of shared values and experiences. Augustus, on the other hand, believed Italy was not a cohesive unit but an administrative convenience; he divided this unit into 11 regions whose ethnic unity he carefully preserved. The great Roman orator, Cicero, thought of Rome as his homeland as a citizen, but called the region of his birth his ancestral homeland. Through reflections on his travels to Italy's many regions, Gilmour discovers that essential Italy remains the Italy of its communes. In Italy, the parts of the nation are greater than its whole, so that a single region, such as Tuscany or the Veneto, could rival every other country in the world in the quality of its art and the civilization of its past. In the case of Italy, though, the parts have not added up to a coherent or identifiable whole. Gilmour's compelling look into Italy's past as a way of understanding its present offers a fascinating glimpse of the failures and triumphs of the country.
