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.
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