Italy Bound

CULTURE

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By STEPHEN HEYMAN

 | NOVEMBER 9, 2011, 10:30 AM

Jens Mortensen

Just in time for Italy’s 150th anniversary (and a major financial crisis), a flurry of new books present the country as frustrating, inscrutable and magnificent.

“Rome” by Robert Hughes (Knopf, $35) A fascinating personal history of the Italian capital, “Rome” begins with an exegesis on the founding myth of Romulus and Remus and ends with a rant about how the city has lost its “Dolce Vita”-era glory. Hughes says Rome has been “gutted by the huge and ruthless takeover of its imagination by mass tourism.” Its television is “crap,” its civic experience “brutally compromised by automobile and driver.” The city that wasn’t built in a day (try 2,500 years) refuses to be understood in the space of “a decade or a guided bus ride.”

“The Pursuit of Italy” by David Gilmour (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $33) Was Italy’s 1861 unification a terrible mistake? Gilmour admits that his “quirkily subjective” book grazes unequally on different regions. Tuscany or the Veneto alone, he claims, could “rival every other country in the world in the quality of its art and the civilization of its past.” But his final verdict is that Italy was “predestined to be a disappointment.” History and geography, Gilmour says, “made certain countries, including France and Britain, more important than the sum of their parts. In Italy the opposite was true.”

“Mamma Mia” by Beppe Severgnini (Rizzoli Ex Libris, $23) Severgnini’s subject — a certain Mr. B — is the embattled Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, whose taste for philandering, cronyism and forcing Angela Merkel into a game of hide-and-seek is drolly explained here for the author’s “friends abroad.” Berlusconi seduces Italians, Severgnini says, by behaving like them. “He prevails by complicity, not example or authority. I am like you: impulsive, intolerant, enthusiastic and impatient.”

“Seeking Sicily” by John Keahey (Thomas Dunne, $28) This erudite travelogue begins in a chaotic Palermo. The author delights in scruffy trattorias and checks into the Hotel des Palmes, where Wagner finished “Parsifal.” Later, he pokes around the underworld, where an anticrime activist says crackdowns are producing unexpected results: “There are a lot of people here who are more afraid of the police than the mafia.” Paradox abounds all over Sicily. Keahey sums up the local attitude with a quote from that Sicilian classic “The Leopard”: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”