Nature and History in Modern Italy

"Anyone seeking a more complicated portrait of modern Italy will find this book a superb guide. It showcases the work of long-acclaimed masters along with rising new talents. Its notes are a gold mine of further reading suggestions and demonstrate how well researched these essays are. The writing is clear and vigorous. The scope is comprehensive. Pack this book along with Baedeker's Italy or the latest edition of Fodor's, and you will have a compelling new perspective on land that has won the hearts of so many people around the world. You will learn much more about what environmental historians do, but also you will see far more clearly what humans and nature have been doing on this narrow, mountainous, and very special place on earth."-from the foreword by Donald Worster, author of The Wealth of Nature and Dust Bowl

"There is currently no coherent synthetic history of Italian environmental particularities such as earthquakes, landslides, deforestation, the early established but inadequate areas of preserved 'wilderness, the wild zones of massive toxic pollution, and the distinctive landscape symbolism of a late-unifying nation-state. This book is to be welcomed as much for its pioneering quality as for the intellectual strengths and empirical interest of its various chapters."uJohn Agnew, author of Places and Politics in Modern Italy

Despite the many ruins dating back to the Romans and the Etruscans, Italy is one of the youngest and most unstable physical landscapes on earth. The still active Vesuvius and the powerful earthquake that devastated L'Aquila in central Italy in 2009 are constant reminders of Italy's history of frequent tremors, devastating landslides, raging floods, and fatal diseases. It was the Italians who invented the word "malaria." Is Italy Il Bel Paeseuthe beautiful countryuworld renowned for its scenery, arts, and cuisine? Or is it a land whose beauty has been cursed by calamity, greed, and pollution? The fifteen essays in Nature and History in Modern Italy investigate that nation's long experience in managing domesticated rather than wild natures and offer insight into the conflicting visions of a unique hybrid landscape fashioned by history as well as by nature.

Marco Armiero is Senior Researcher at the Italian National Research Council and Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technologies, Universitat Aut(noma de Barcelona. He has published extensively on-Italian environmental history and edited Views from the South: Environmental Stories from the Mediterranean World.

Marcus Hall is Senior Lecturer in Environmental History at the University of Zurich, His several writings about the past and prospect of land management focus on Italy as a case study, including Earth Repair: A Transatlantic History of Environmental Restoration, winner of the Downing Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians.