A Concise History of Italy

This is a very brief overview, giving an excellent introduction to the non-specialist whilst simultaneously providing food for thought to those already in the know. And it is a model of good, stimulating writing. The first two chapters alone are worth the cover price. The only disadvantage is that the coverage of the early and central Middle Ages is way too thin, even for such a short book. But the emphasis upon how recent is the construction of Italian 'nationhood' is excellently argued, and put me in mind of Graham Robb's recent "The Discovery of France". Great stuff!

This book offers the best introduction available to the history of Italy. In less than three hundred pages, Duggan offers a concise summary of the past 1600 years of the peninsula. His focus in this book is on the multitude of efforts during this period to build an Italian nation out of the rubble of the Roman empire, a goal only achieved in 1860 and then in an imperfect, fragmentary form, with subsequent generations left with the more difficult task of creating a national identity. Duggan recounts this with insight and the result is essential reading, not only for students of Italy's past but for those seeking insight into the nation's troubled present as well.

This book is great for the student or traveller wishing to get a quick overview of Italy, it's politics, and it's people. I read this on a plane from NYC to Rome and finished it. It is very easy to read. It really doesn't leave anything out either; the general history of Italy is covered. Also, the bibliography will point you in the right direction for additional reading.

The book is, as the title indicates, a "concise" history. Very concise, and incredibly well written! The authors cover a lot of ground, and so few words are devoted to character development or the broader context of historical events that one might expect the book to read like an almanac. But the Duggans do an amazing job of giving us an emminently readable, interesting, and cohesive outline of Italy's political history. Through an excellent (almost poetic) economy of words, they have fully realized the book's potential.

Christopher Duggan's Concise History of Italy (320 pp.) covers the period since the fall of Rome in 410 and the entire Italian peninsula. Yet the focus on the book is on the history of Italy as a whole; as Italy was not united before 1860 (1871), those who are interested in the history of Italy's individual states have to look elsewhere for further information. The focus on Italy as a whole also explains why the book's emphasis lies on the years after the French Revolution (pp.87-295). For readers who want to understand the development of Italy, the growth of nationalist sentiment, the overcoming of it's partition, the problems of unification, the different development of the industrial north, the administrative center and the agricultural south, of the antagonism between the liberal state and the catholic church, the failure of democracy and the establishment of the corporate state etc. the book provides an excellent, yet concise and easy-to-read analysis. It is at times short on historical data; the Historical Dictionary of Modern Italy ed. by K.R. Nilsson and M.F. Gilbert therefore is a useful addition.