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David Gilmour

The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples Hardcover – October 25, 2011

by David Gilmour (Author)

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One of The Economists 2011 Books of the Year Did Garibaldi do Italy a disservice when he helped its disparate parts achieve unity? Was the goal of political unification a mistake? These questions are asked and answered in a number of ways in this engaging, original consideration of the many histories that contribute to the brillianceand weaknessof Italy today.David Gilmours wonderfully readable exploration of Italian life over the centuries is filled with provocative anecdotes as well as personal observations, and is peopled with the great figures of the Italian pastfrom Cicero and Virgil to Dante and the Medicis, from Garibaldi and Cavour to the controversial politicians of the twentieth century. Gilmours wise account of the Risorgimento, the pivotal epoch in modern Italian history, debunks the nationalistic myths that surround it, though he paints a sympathetic portrait of Giuseppe Ve

Print length

480 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date

October 25, 2011
Dimensions

6.47 x 1.61 x 9.07 inches
ISBN-10

0374283168
ISBN-13

978-0374283162
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Sir David Gilmour is one of Britain's most admired and accomplished historical writers and biographers. His previous books include The Last Leopard, The Long Recessional (FSG, 2002), and, most recently, The Ruling Caste (FSG, 2006).

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (October 25, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 480 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0374283168
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0374283162
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.65 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.47 x 1.61 x 9.07 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,054,314 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,035 in Italian History (Books)
- #1,114 in general Italy Travel Guides
- #3,013 in Travelogues & Travel Essays

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David H. MacCallum

deep knowledge of italy and the italians makes a wonderful read

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 15, 2012

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Many of us have been to Italy or know Italians or have married an Italian or have driven an Italian car or eaten wonderful Italian food or have marveled at Italian art or have listened with wonder to Italian music or have admired Italian architecture or have read the great Italian poets or have experienced its sense of "la dolce vita". In fact, few, if any, people have had such an indelible impression on our daily lives as the Italians. Yet Italy itself, the land of the Italian people, has had a difficult history. Difficult, in fact, is not a remotely appropriate adjective to describe a history full of feckless leaders, unremitting intrigues and conspiracies, massive corruption and military ineptitude.

David Gilmour, in this authoritative overview of Italian history, describes the central problem with Italy. "Geography and the vicissitudes of history made certain countries, including France and Britain, more important than the sum of their parts...In Italy the opposite was true. The parts are so stupendous that a single region...would rival every other country in the world in the quality of its art and the civilization of its past." Italy, Gilmour concludes, has produced an unending kaleidoscope of great human achievement but continues to be unable to create a strong, effective national government that can produce a great society. In fact, in the two great periods of Italian history - the Renaissance and the Middle Ages - Italy was in fact not a nation but a collection of vastly different regional kingdoms, in many cases kingdoms in which Italian was not a well-understood language.

Italy has had occasional national leaders, some of whom were not in fact Italian, but it has also had its full share of destructive, power-mad leaders, including Mussolini and, more recently Berlusconi. Only with Julius Caesar, now two thousand years in the past, has Italy produced a leader on the scale of Bismark, Peter the Great, deGaulle, or Churchill. Gilmour searches for reasons to explain why it is that Italy has failed to become the great nation-state that its enormous talents deserve. He does this with skill, copious knowledge, terrific insight and a continual sense of ironic humor. He knows Italy well. He explains Italy's plight with great clarity and a firm grasp on the consequences of its citizens to place their region first and the nation second.

This is, at times, a sad story. Just as the Civil War in the United States ultimately made a strong nation out of two strong regions, Italy was in the midst of a failed effort to make a nation out of regions, some not larger than cities, such as Venice, Naples and Florence. These divisions and regional jealousies exist today. Sicily is still only remotely governed by national authorities. The difference between the North of Italy, industrious, developed and European, and the South of Italy, economically weak and close to ungovernable, remains stark.

You will find in this book a wonderful series of historical sketches, outlining the high and low points of Italian history. One reads the book, however, with a mounting sense of disappointment that Italy could not have become more than it is. It is a complex story and Gilmour tells this tangled tale very well. You will not, however, find the key to the way out. Italy is the land of Italians and it seems that these enormously talented people have a way of living that is totally unique and admirable in so many ways. Their life has worked for them for two thousand years and will probably carry on roughly the same, with all the achievements and all the disappointments, for quite a bit longer.

13 people found this helpful

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The Sum of all Her People

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 26, 2011

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Gilmour's pursuit is ambitious both in scope and intent, covering Italy's land, regions and people from Ancient Rome to the Berlusconi administrations in a tightly written 400 pages. He cautions that since this is not an academic work (although 376 source books are cited in the text), he has allowed himself "to be quirkily subjective in (his) selection of topics."

The author begins with a discussion of Italy's defining geographic features: too long; easily invaded; divided from north to south and from east to west; lacking in timber, fish, fishermen, sailors and navigable rivers; malaria prone and multi-racial. Gimour proceeds to review almost every important era of the peninsula's history from Imperial Rome through the Risorgimento and ending with a review of today's economic, social and political challenges. His approach is to analyze the country's centrifugal tendencies, arguing that more traditional histories "had been written from a centripetal view, as if Italian unity had been pre-ordained." Questioning whether unification had been either necessary or inevitable, Gilmour asks: "Were there not just too many Italies for a successful unity?"

Early portions of the text can be a bit challenging as the author weaves together the varied and complex historical threads of the Holy Roman Empire. The book takes off, however, in an extended and lucid description of the Risorgimento. Gilmour sees the latter resulting from a war of expansion conducted by the Piedmontese. "Annexation (of the Papal States and the Kingdom of The Two Sicilies) plainly meant 'piedmontization', the imposition of northern laws, customs and institutions on distant regions with no experience of their workings." The Kingdom of Italy was formally proclaimed in 1861 but, constitutionally, was a greatly expanded Piedmont with a new name. Venice and Rome fell into Italy's hands in 1866 and 1870 respectively more as the result of machinations between Austria, Prussia and France than through Italian military or political victories. In Gilmour's view, nationalist Italy was more imposition than evolution.

"Nearly a century and a half after unification - and more than sixty years after Mussolini's death - Italian politics had still been unable to settle into any kind of rhythm or consistency," concludes the author. Italy's birth rate, economic growth and EU compliance are at low points while its Corruption Index (according to Transparency International ranking) rises. The sense of national unity, Gilmour argues, has disappeared as Italians increasingly question the legitimacy of the state.

Countries such as Britain and France, observe Gilmour, are more important than the sum of their parts. Communal Italy, however, represented in its cities and regions, is the strength of the country and receives the true allegiance of its citizenry. The author quotes Luigi Barzini who stated that Italy "has never been as good as the sum of all her people." The reader is left to conclude that Gilmour agrees with Giustino Fortunato who declared in 1899 "that the unification of Italy was a sin against history and geography."

The Pursuit of Italy ends in a question about its efficacy as a unified nation, one thought to have been settled in the affirmative long ago. As a result, this book is entertaining and truly thought-provoking, which can't help but be a good combination.

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David K. Warner

Is Italy necessary?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 13, 2020

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This is very much a personal view of the history of Italy, and while that makes it a lively read, it is not an objective one, indeed, it is a book written with the intention of debunking national myths about the country and arguing that not only was Italian unification in 1859-61 to 1870 an unnecessary and non-determinate process, but also it was a negative one for the peoples of the new state, particularly those of the south.
David Gilmour in effect approaches Italian history in a tripartite manner. Firstly, he narrates the story of post-Roman, medieval, and early modern Italy in its various city states, republics, duchies, and kingdoms up to the French Revolution and Napoleonic conquest, then he examines the inchoate development of national consciousness, the Risorgimento and unification as far as its completion in 1870, and, finally, he retells the sad story of Italy's political and military failures as a united nation from 1870 through the unneeded sacrifices of the Great War, the era of Mussolini, and onto the moral defeats of 1943-5, followed by a study of how Italian postwar economic resurgence went hand-in-hand with corruption and political torpidity. In this sense, Gilmour concludes, modern Italy is a failure as a nation state, is best understood as a cultural and social amalgamation of regional peoples who share the lands below the Alps, and is now more comfortable and stable as a federation de facto within the European Union.
Gilmour clearly loves Italy, its varied peoples, its cuisine, art, literature, and music, but he constantly fails to see its value as a nation. He makes the point that while other nations were formed over centuries like England or forged in national wars like France in 1792-1815 or Germany in 1864-71, Italy was created almost by accident as a side-effect of Great Power rivalry over the European balance of power, and not by it's own soldiers but by those of other nations, while at the same time the political victors of the process who then attempted to create Italy in their own image were the north-westerners of Piedmont-Sardinia, whose actions from 1860 onwards under the Savoyard monarchy were often tantamount more to conquest than to national liberation. Gilmour seemingly regards the Piedmontese as insufficiently Italian in comparison to those who live below the Po, particularly the Neopolitans, Calabrians, and Sicilians, but also the Tuscans and those of the Romagna. As regards Venice, he bemoans the suppression of its republic in 1797, but argues that it was better managed under the Austrians from 1815 to 1866 than after its incorporation into the kingdom of Italy, while generally he takes a benign view of Austrian rule, as he does of the Bourbons of the Two Sicilies, when compared to the Savoyards or Mussolini and after. He certainly puts the case that Venice would have benefited from pursing a course independent of Italy, while he abhors the subsuming of the South Tyrol, Trentino and Trieste into a nation which cut them off from their natural cultural, social, and economic central European hinterlands.
The problem with unification, as the author sees it, was that rather than national identity being the precursor to the creation of the nation state, in Italy a national consciousness had to be developed almost from scratch after the unification of peoples who were mostly indifferent or even hostile to Italy, and who continued to identify themselves not with the country but with their region and locality. And it was this process of forming a new nation that was to lead to the tragedies and cruelties of uneconomic colonial adventures and unnecessary wars, usually accompanied by military defeat, and which was to reach its apogee in fascism and the dictatorship of Mussolini from 1922 to 1943. However, to see Mussolini as the fruit of national unification is overly teleological and as jejune as regarding Hitler as the product of German unification or Franco as the result of the Reconquista!
So, Gilmour is actually disappointed in Italy as a political entity, but he fails to examine more closely why Italian unification came about at the time and in the way it did, often seeing the Italian peoples as passive in their own national creation and overly dependent upon the intervention of others, while he fails to make comparisons with other nations whose unification was an equally conflicted and imperfect process such as France and, especially, Spain, where regionalism remains a strong and often disruptive presence; indeed, even in England, a unified political entity since the ninth century, there still remain strong regional political and cultural differences and the existence of a North-South divide not totally different from that of Italy. However, it may be that this book written at the high tide of European federalist hopes betrays the political instincts of its author in its inability to understand nationalism and the constructs that the creation of any national identity requires, including the need for myths of foundation and association. For Gilmour, Italy has no heroes, except perhaps for Garibaldi, and he very much disabuses the reader of the place of Victor Emmanuel II and Cavour in the pantheon of national icons, fairly in the case of the former, but unfairly so in the latter, whose death three months after unification makes it ridiculous to blame him for the faults of post-1870 Italy, whatever his other failures. Whereas Bismarck not only created a united Germany but also saw it through its early years (until unceremoniously dropped by the infantile and militaristic Wilhelm II), Cavour never had the same opportunity, and the forging of the new nation was left to lesser men.
That Gilmour concludes that Italy has failed as a nation is in concert with modern liberal, Europhile attitudes towards the nation state and allies with an over abundant belief in the benefits of European political federation and economic union. In the end, while Gilmour writes a readable book about the pursuit of an Italian nation, he makes little effort to understand what a nation is or what value it serves, preferring to favour a federation that was never viable in 1861, and in lieu of that, Italy as a conglomerate of regions within the European Union. But what point is there in writing about an Italy of which, as a political entity, one does not approve? And, while disavowing Metternich's notorious statement, he never in this book succeeds in refuting the idea that Italy is not much more than a geographical expression. It may well be that it is not Italian unification that is at fault but the poor quality of the politicians who ineptly guided the country after 1861, and that perhaps greater statesmanship and more effective and representative political institutions may have led to a happier history. After all, German unification was deemed by many a success, satisfying as it did a need for national identity, and yet in the hands of the last Kaiser and then under the Nazis it was still led into the most abject and criminal tyrannies. That Germany in its original conception was a failed federation under overbearing Prussian and Hohenzollern leadership, only properly constituted by the western Allies after 1945, and then at the cost of a 45 year partition, perhaps gives the lie to the argument that an Italian federation, as favoured by Gilmour, would have been more successful. Modern Italy since 1870 may well be regarded as a political failure (although not from 1945 to 1990 an economic one), but the reasons for that lie less in the intention or inception of unification and more in the small minded and petty political wheeler-dealers who came to constitute its political class, a class whose dominance of power has only been sidelined by the megalomania of Mussolini and the egoism of Berlusconi. Italy is thus the result of the failure of its politicians and its politics, neither of which rose to the challenge of building a modern, democratic, and united nation state.

13 people found this helpful

Alcabe

Very, very dry

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 19, 2020

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I read several very positive reviews, and even on the cover there is one saying"vivid and witty". I disagree vehemently. It's actually an informational tome about an unusual country, detailed with lots of notes. I have soldiered on, in the hope that it became less dense, but had to give up on p.82, by which time I had yet to read anything witty or even vivid. I would like to know more, but it's written in such a way as to make my mind wander. This is essentially a textbook.

2 people found this helpful

Investigator

Highly Readable, Not Dry at All

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 21, 2020

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This book is packed full of interesting facts and anecdotes from Italian history. It's witty, informed, analytical, erudite and most of all very readable. Its takes us right up to Berlusconi's time. The author is more than willing to draw many conclusions about the Italian nation along the way. Superb.

2 people found this helpful

Italophile

A fascinating revisionist view of modern Italian history

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 18, 2013

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This was for me a book of two (unequal) halves. The history of the Italian peninsula prior to Napoleon is covered in a mere 120 or so pages, a level of coverage that is only really sufficient to demonstrate how fractured "Italy" was in the period between the end of the Roman empire and the 19th century, and how subject to various and changing types of foreign rule. Possibly this is enough to support the main argument in the rest of the book, namely that effect of this diverse historical background, including the inconvenient fact that foreign rule could be relatively benign, was that there was little grassroots enthusiasm for unification when it came in the second half of the nineteenth century, largely imposed by the Savoy rulers of Piedmont. An unfortunate consequence of this was that the newly unified country felt compelled to embark on ill-advised foreign adventures, to create a national myth. However, these were so badly led that they either failed in their underlying purpose or, if they succeeded in it at all, this was only because their outcomes were misrepresented to the Italian people. The author largely welcomes Italy's abandonment of foreign pretensions in the post-Mussolini period, although against the economic success enjoyed since the War, he has to set the serious problems of governance that are so familiar to even casual observers of Italy today.

In challenging the notion that the unification of Italy was an inevitable and positive outcome, Gilmour certainly questions the notion of Italian history as I received it. I now look forward to seeing whether another writer can effectively rebut Gilmour's argument.

One person found this helpful

Russell Whyman

Need To Read Again

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 30, 2018

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I found this book to be very difficult to follow at times. The author frequently jumps around in history and location. I also felt sometimes as if I was missing something or wasn't party to some of the required background.

The book however contains a wealth of information and it is very well researched. I
think I need to read it again at some stage making notes and organising things into a more cohesive whole to get the most from it. All in all though a very interesting read.

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The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples Hardcover – October 25, 2011

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