The Dark Heart of Italy (Paperback)

~ (Author) "I arrived in Parma knowing only a few Italian words culled from classical music and from menus (adagio, allegro, pro-sciutto, and so on), and I..." (more)
Key Phrases: Piazza Fontana, Forza Italia, Padre Pio (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With his first book, Jones must now be admitted to the company of writers such as Alexander Stille and Tim Parks who seem to understand Italy and the Italians better than the natives do themselves. Jones excels at writing about the passions aroused on the soccer field and the dirty machinations in the club offices in an entertaining chapter entitled "Penalties and Impunity." He realizes, though, that soccer is just a manifestation of a deeper, lurking cancer: Italy's dismal mediacracy. It all began in the wake of "Tangentopoli," the massive corruption scandal in the early 1990s that brought down a regime that included the eternally powerful Christian Democrats and their partners in a Faustian pact, the Socialists. Into this political vacuum stepped the irrepressible owner of the country's most successful soccer club, A.C. Milan, Silvio Berlusconi. He built a media empire that now touches every aspect of daily life in Italy; his presence hovers over Italians much as Big Brother hovers over 1984 and his visage looms over a typical Italian town on the book's cover. But Berlusconi, writes Jones, although on the political scene for a decade, is a relatively recent chapter in the sordid history of Italy. Jones does a fine job of explicating (as much as it can be explicated) the murky history of neo-fascist, right-wing and Mafia intrigues against the Italian Republic after WWII. On a lighter note, he playfully dissects the Italians' obsession with beauty and eroticism. Jones, who had been on the staff of the London Review of Books, moved to Parma in 1999 and has developed a sincere and profound love of Italy and the Italians.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The New Yorker

In 1999, Jones moved to Italy, and he explores his adoptive country with a loving, sometimes cynical, always questioning eye. He points out that the word storia means both "history" and "story," and that the distinction is not always clear. Themes and subjects recur in his quest for understanding: soccer, language, and, above all, the grandiose figure of the prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. He is attuned to the perspective of the ordinary citizens he meets in bars and post-office lines, but he also gets behind the surface, providing neat background summaries of such phenomena as the "clean hands" investigations of the nineties, the Vatican finance scandals of the seventies, and why Italian TV is as bad as it is. While he finds Italy "infuriating and endlessly irritating," he can't imagine leaving, because "life seems less exciting outside Italy."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: North Point Press (May 19, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0865477248
• ISBN-13: 978-0865477247
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #143,385 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Illuminating!, January 24, 2006

By	Guitarrista "rasgueado" (Syracuse NY) - See all my reviews

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!

26 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Time to reconsider our patronizing love for Italy, April 1, 2004

By	paul paran (Bruxelles) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Dark Heart of Italy (Hardcover)

After all the praise for Tuscany and the Italian charms, let's welcome a realistic discussion by an Englishman who was disappointed after living a few years in Italy. It's funny how hasty tourists usually celebrate Italy while those who actually live there, like Jones, or Tim Parks, or Donna Leon, find a lot of negative aspects. Probably, this comes from the fact that Italians nurture appearances ("bella figura") while hiding their true feelings. So, when strangers get to know the real Italy, they feel betrayed.
In the past, strangers felt obliged to be nice to Italians who were economically underdeveloped compared to northern Europeans. Today central and northern Italy has a per-capita income which is 20% higher than the average income in France, Germany or the UK. It is time to judge Italians without condescension.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars 4 stars for "is it worth reading?".., October 3, 2005

By	Cynthia Quilici "optimist" - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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..