Nature and History in Modern Italy

About this book

Is Italy "il bel paese" - the beautiful country - where tourists spend their vacations looking for art, history, and nature? Or is it a land whose beauty has been cursed by humanity's greed and nature's cruelty? The answer is largely a matter of narrative and the narrator's vision of Italy. The fifteen essays in "Nature and History in Modern Italy" investigate that nation's long experience in managing domesticated rather than wild natures and offer insight into these conflicting visions. Italians shaped their land in the most literal sense, producing the landscape, sculpting its heritage, embedding memory in nature, and rendering the two different visions inseparable. The interplay of Italy's rich human history and its dramatic natural diversity is a subject with broad appeal to a wide range of readers.

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Biography

Marco Armiero is a senior researcher at the Institute for the Study of Mediterranean Societies at the Italian National Research Council and a visiting scholar at Stanford University. He has published extensively on Italian environmental history and edited "Views from the South: Environmental Stories from the Mediterranean World".

Marcus Hall is senior lecturer in environmental sciences at the University of Zurich and assistant professor of history at the University of Utah. His book "Earth Repair: A Transatlantic History of Environmental Restoration" received the Downing Book Award of the Society of Architectural Historians.