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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Illuminating!, January 24, 2006
This review is from: The Dark Heart of Italy (Paperback)
When I saw the title of this, at first I thought, "hatchet job". But even the introduction drew me right in. I love to travel, and it's always easy to think the grass is greener elsewhere. That's why now and then I like to get a more critical view of a place. It's easy to be seduced by a place as beautiful as Italy. This book does a beautiful job of presenting a portrait of Italian life. As an example, the byzantine process of buying a house there left me shaking my head. And the peculiar ways of the government and religious establishment are mind-boggling. Yet, he clearly loves it there, and points out the everyday beauty of life there very well. Somebody made a fairly sarcastic comment about how Jones thinks Italy is a beautiful place as long as you eliminate the people. To me, this person got it entirely backwards. If anything, Jones is saying that the people, the language, the artisan stores, the conversations, and the amateur football are beautiful, it's the government that ruins the situation, and guess who is at the helm? The guy who owns half the country. No conflict of interest there. But Jones even admits that there are things about Berlusconi that he does like. Of course, I'm sure that many readers can't tolerate a critical view of anything that they have personal feelings for, but that's another woeful topic entirely. I did bog down a bit in the descriptions of the many political scandals. There are so many of them that one would probably need a timeline or chart to keep them straight. The many stories of individual Italians are delightful. The very old lady at the football game hilariously stands out. I suppose he could have been less controversial by calling it something like The Complex Heart of Italy, but I can't blame him at all for having a bold title, and I think it's more effective. All in all, a great read!
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
4 stars for "is it worth reading?".., October 3, 2005
This review is from: The Dark Heart of Italy (Paperback)
3 stars for all the drawbacks noted by other reviewers (the political excerpts and citations were not handled all that well, the book felt discontinuous, and he could have easily found out why mysteries are called "gialli" and so on -- there is some laziness). His analyses of Italian culture are not far off, though. If he had reinforced some of his theories by hashing them out more with real Italians or spending more time in Itay I don't think it would have changed the book much. Italians are indeed jaded with their systems, and it is not so much laziness as a keen and entirely justified sense of futility that keeps them from open revolt. Soccer is written about extensively because it is the national obsession and mirrors Italian life in many ways, as the author describes. If you don't like soccer you start out at a considerable disadvantage here. I think that with more time and care this could have become two books: one on general culture and life, and the other focusing more on politics. I can kind of see why he's attempting to weave them together, but I can't say that I have met many Italians who are in any way interested in politics; the one or two who have been look at it completely from an opportunistic point of view. Americans have a hard time understanding how much the "party" controls everyday life here.. party contacts get you a job, a building permit, your company magically wins a bid, your red tape goes away, and so on... This is what life is like here; it is not Jones' "claim." The only strong principled stance I have ever heard expressed by politicians is that against the death penalty; the rest is just a perpetual motion conspiracy machine that keeps them rotating in their 'poltrone' -their comfortable positions- in a never-ending game of musical chairs. As another reviewer pointed out, figuring out Italian politics is like nailing Jell-O to the wall, or herding cats. The targets are always moving, the story never ends, the facts never come to light. (I tell people to imagine if every news story in the U.S. were to play out like the Kennedy assassination, only with no Zapruder film and no Warren Commission). However, my Italian husband highly recommends Indro Montanelli's "L'Italia del Novecento" (20th-Century Italy), so keep an eye out for that if it ever gets translated, for a thorough, level-headed overview by one of that nation's top journalists, that carries through the 2000 elections. "The Dark Heart of Italy" is a good book if you want to dip your toe into the murky waters.. If you've got scuba gear check out "In God's Name" by David (?) Yallop..
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beyond the Tuscan sun: 21st century Italian politics, September 7, 2003
If your interest in Italy goes beyond travel guides to Tuscany, Florence, and Rome (which I have also reviewed on this website), you might find this analysis of Italian politics and society at the turn of the century very informative. Even while I was enjoying monuments and countryside in Venice and Tuscany, I found it hard to put down the sober assessment of Italian society and politics in this book which I picked up in a Roman bookstore. For Jones, a British author, is not an occasional visitor to Italy, but instead spent four years travelling through the Italian peninsula seeking to unravel some of its enigmatic political institutions and attitudes. Much of the book is solidly researched and he extensively draws from numerous references in Italian which he translates himself. Knowing well that much of this beautiful country is well described elsewhere, he does not seek to prettify any of the issues he discusses, whether it is political corruption (a major theme of the book), religion, or football. For example, his chapter on the workings of Italy's Slaughter Commission, a parlimentary investigation into a series of bloody bombings in Italian cities from the 1960s to the 1980s, is a chilling account of paralysis of Italian political institutions. Documenting the almost surreal investigation of the Piazza Fontana bombings of 1969, he observes: QUOTE The irony is that Italy, so painfully legalistic, is as a result almost lawless. If you've got so many laws, they can do anything for you. You can twist them, reaarange them, rewrite them. Here, laws or facts are like playing cards: you simply have to shuffle them and fan them out to suit yourself UNQUOTE As the title suggests, this book is a far cry from the more bucolic images found in Italian travel guides. I found it highly readable and insightful.
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