Customer Reviews

A Concise History of Italy (Cambridge Concise Histories)

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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.

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.

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 well describes the problems Italy was facing with foreign powers after the Roman Empire fell and how they regained control. It really describes the Risorgimento well and included all of the major leaders involved. France's influence is also well explained and shows the series of events, including the deaths of leaders and the creation of new leaders, that shaped modern day Italy.

To describe this book! The history begins in 1860 when Italy actually became an organized country. If you are looking for info prior to that, buy a book on Greek and Roman history. Very readable, lots of info, great if you just want to get your feet wet with Italian history.

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!

In the first chapter Duggan talks about the geographical reasons for Italy not being a unified country. It would be useful to compare this with the rise of Rome, but this book begins at the end of the Western Roman Empire. Italy was exposed on the coast and also on the north by land, but so was Rome.

From reading this book, it looks like the big reason why Italy didn't unite is because there were two big powers, the Papacy and the Empire, that were too powerful for any small Italian state to confront. The Papacy didn't have the initiative to unite the country, but it was powerful enough to stop others from uniting the country.

"[The prosperity of the Italian states] in the Middle Ages had depended in part on the inability of the Holy Roman Empire or any other power to subdue them: and this had allowed free rein to local political and economic energies. However, the strength of the communes had simultaneously worked against the emergence of extensive well-integrated territorial units; not least because the main cities had always been rich enough to put strong armies into the field, and defend themselves against the predations of neighbours. So long as other parts of Europe were weakened by rivalries between the crown and the feudal nobility, Italy was relatively safe; but once these disputes were resolved (as they began to be in France and Spain by the end of the fifteenth century), powerful monarchies suddenly appeared with an economic and military potential that outstripped anything in Italy." (p. 61)

The most detailed maps in the book are on pages 64, 131, and 197. It would have been useful to have a detailed map to refer to at the start or the end of the book for use while reading, rather than having to thumb through the pages to find these maps.

I found this book to be unreadable. It's very dense and hard to read and I read a lot of books about history. It may be factually accurate and well researched (although I don't know because I couldn't get past the first chapter) but it's not enjoyable in the least.