Book Description

“First of all, let’s get one thing straight. Your Italy and our Italia are not the same thing. Italy is a soft drug peddled in predictable packages such as hills in the sunset, olive groves and raven-haired girls. Italia, on the other hand, is a maze. In Italia you can go round and round in circles for years. Which of course, is great fun.”

Join Beppe Severgnini on this hilarious tour of modern Italy that takes you behind the seductive face it puts on for visitors - la bella figura - and uncovers the far more complex true self. So, alongside the historic cities and glorious countryside, there’ll be stops at the places where the Italians reveal themselves in all their authentic, maddening glory: the airport, the motorway and the bedroom…

Ten days, thirty places. From north to south, from food to politics, from saintliness to sexuality, Beppe will help you understand why Italy ‘can have you fuming and then purring in the space of a hundred meters or ten minutes.’

Beppe Severgnini is a columnist for Italy’s largest-circulation daily newspaper, Corriere della Sera and covered Italy for The Economist from 1993 to 2003. He lived in London for more than fifteen years and is a self-confessioned Anglophile. Beppe now lives with his family in Crema on the outskirts of Milan.

Book Dimension

length: (cm)17.8 　　　 　　　　　 　　　　　 width:(cm)11.1