The modern Italian state celebrates its 150th anniversary this year but, as David Gilmour makes clear in this highly personal account of the peninsula’s past and present, the celebrations should be, must be, tinged with regret: ‘Geography and the vicissitudes of history made certain countries, including France and Britain, more important than the sum of their parts might have indicated. In Italy the opposite was true. The parts are so stupendous that a single region – either Tuscany or the Veneto – would rival every other country in the world in the quality of its art and the civilisation of its past. But the parts have not added up to a coherent or identifiable whole. United Italy never became the nation its founders had hoped for because its making had been flawed both in conception and in execution, because it had been truly what [Giustino] Fortunato was told by his father, “a sin against history and geography”. It was thus predestined to be a disappointment, to be what Luigi Barzini regretfully recognised many years ago, a country that “has never been as good as the sum of all her people”.’

Penguin | Paperback 480 pp. |ISBN: 9780141043418