The Italians

I read this book as part of preparing to go abroad to Florence during Winter of 2019. The book is a great crash course of Italian culture, which offers much to surprise you if you aren’t aware of the less obvious, but still important differences of their culture with respect to the US and even to the rest of Europe. The focus is on contemporary culture and any history is often used as context for explaining the modern culture. It’s easy to read and at 300 pages, not that long, and overall a useful book if you want to visit the country and have an analytic eye for the people and how culture gets spread and preserved.

The most interesting part of the book was the amount of surface-level paradoxes that the Italian culture sports. On one hand, the land has an enormous amount of preserved history due to its historical significance and yet the country Italy is less than 200 years old. There is a culture around furbizia, or being sly and getting away with breaking rules, but the country is also largely run on an honor system. There are fashionable people everywhere with so much beauty on the surface, though underneath they are trying just as hard to maintain their image – their bella figura – as everyone else. And, the culture that gave birth to the marvel of politics and governance in the Roman Republic also gave birth to some of the most notorious organized crime groups in the world. Behind all of these paradoxes, the culture is vibrant with life and I’m hoping to see how exactly such a culture weaves itself within the people.