Book review: "The Shortest History of Italy" by Ross King

 

When you're about two-thirds into this book, you realize that Ross King could have cheated by documenting only the last 150-odd years of the history of Italy, because before that, Italy wasn't a country. Luckily for us, the author starts around 1200 BCE and takes us through 3000 years of history in less than 250 pages. 

Before reading this book, when I thought of Italy, three periods came to mind: Ancient Rome, especially those crazy emperors; the Renaissance; and Mussolini. As it turns out, the history of the country-that-mostly-isn't-a-country is a wild ride that goes off in all kinds of directions. Its cities constantly take turns dominating the area. First it's Rome, obviously, but then it's Ravenna, next Venice, then Florence, and later Milan. For most of its history, "Italy" is a hodgepodge of small city-states, many of them running something approximating democracy, and all of them constantly being invaded (by Huns, Goths, Lombards, Normans, Napoleon, and each other), overtaken, decimated by disease, or otherwise in a state of flux. Even something as basic as the Italian language isn't properly fixed in place until the 1800s. After the country unifies in the 1860s, things don't exactly calm down. Whatever else you might say about Italy, boring it's not.

The book is very enjoyable to read: never oversimplifying, fast-paced and full of fun little anecdotes. The writer obviously knows his stuff and uses foreshadowing and back-referencing to stitch together the fragments of Italian history into something resembling a coherent narrative. As a quick introduction to the country and its history, this book is hard to beat.

Book review: "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis" by Giorgio Bassani

 

Many attempts have been made to express the loss that the Holocaust caused, the huge gaping hole left across Europe by the millions of lives it claimed. This classic Italian novel is a melancholy, poetic portrayal of the Jewish community, leading up to its extinction, in the city of Ferrara. It's all the more heart-rending because it barely touches on the impending doom, leaving the reader to fill in the blanks.

My edition of the book included an introduction that compared the book to Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited," and like that novel, here, too, an unassuming narrator from a humble background finds himself mesmerized by an elite family, especially one of its members. And that's a fair comparison. But in "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis," the inevitable, omitted final chapter looms over the book like a sword of Damocles. 

In the novel, the unnamed narrator, who presumably lives in the Jewish ghetto in the south of the city, befriends the Finzi-Continis, a well-to-do, intellectual family living in the richer, greener north. When Mussolini's oppressive antisemitic laws forbid Jews from playing at the local tennis club, the Finzi-Continis instead host tennis matches in their large garden. There isn't all that much of a plot here, but there doesn't need to be. The narrator's hopeless infatuation with the daughter of the family, Micol, feels like a metaphor for the hopeless situation the characters find themselves in --without realizing it.

It's rare to come across good writing, but this is it.

Book Review: "Ravenna - Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe" by Judith Herrin

Growing up in the Netherlands in the 1970s and 1980s, I always felt that there was a gap in the history of my country. What was going on after the Romans left and before the Middle Ages properly began? From roughly 400 to 1100, nothing much seemed to be going on in my country, nor indeed anywhere else in Western Europe. Charlemagne seemed to be the only noteworthy character from those days. And the Roman Empire? Well, it was gone after the barbarians destroyed Rome around the year 500. There was something called the East Roman Empire, which went on for about 1000 years longer, but my history teachers didn't really dwell on that.

"Ravenna" by Judith Herrin explains the history of the two Roman empires, the one based in Rome and the one based in Constantinople, through the perspective of one Northern Italian city, Ravenna, that linked them together, but today doesn't even make it into the top 20 places to visit in Italy.

My history books was right in saying that, after the sacking of Rome (or rather sackings --there were several), its population was decimated --in the original sense of the word, from some 600,000 people to barely 60,000. Its political power was equally diminished: "Rome" no longer controlled present-day France, Italy, England or Germany. 

But the Roman Empire was far from gone. It continued to flourish, now as a Christian society with its headquarters in Constantinople (later Byzantium and eventually Istanbul). From there, the emperor called the shots and controlled a huge area, covering almost all land around the Mediterranean, from Andalusia to Syria. And Ravenna was the capital of the western half of the empire.

The various groups of barbarians who were fighting all over Europe in the 400s through 600s, the Huns, the Goths, the Lombards, may seem at first glance as the logical mortal enemies of this empire. But the Constantinopolitan emperors were not the decadent, Rome-burning fiddlers many of us are familiar with, and the barbarians were less barbaric than you might imagine. Sharing the Christian faith, the two  groups actually found common ground, and the symbol of this new convergence was King Theoderic (thee-OH-de-rick), whose long and wise rule over Ravenna and its territories cemented the city's importance for centuries to come. Theoderic is decidedly civilized, focused on good governance rather than on splitting skulls, and surprisingly tolerant --for example, he treats his Jewish subjects with much more respect than the rest of Europe does.

The book also makes clear how the early Middle Ages were defined by endless quibbles over what even present-day Christians might consider minor doctrinal details. The exact nature of the Holy Trinity, for example, was a topic of heated debate, and led to schisms between the Arian Christians (that's Arian, not Aryan) in the east and the Catholic Christians in the west. The city of Rome was pretty much an afterthought, and not at all the heart of Christianity that it would later become. Also, some eight or nine centuries before Calvinists in the north would destroy depictions of Jesus, Byzantium had its own iconoclasm, possibly under the influence of the Muslims, who were keeping the eastern part of the empire busy with their attacks, and opposed depictions of the Prophet pretty much from day one.

The happy side effect of these Muslim conquests was that the eastern emperor took his eye off the ball in the west, allowing Ravenna to keep its "graven images," allowing many of them to survive until today (although the mosaic of Theoderic would eventually be covered up). This is what makes Ravenna so special: it's one of the few places where early Christian art survives.

"Ravenna" is much more than a history of the city; it's a portrait of Europe and the Middle East in that fairly unknown period from roughly 300 to 700. The book is also well-written and especially well-structured: it's divided into parts, then chapters, then sections, the last of which never cover more than about 4-5 pages, making the information much more bite-sized than your average history books. Multiple inserts show the beautiful mosaics and buildings in Ravenna that managed to survive till the present day.