Nature and History in Modern Italy

Is Italy il bel paese-the beautiful country-where tourists spend their vacations looking for art, history, and scenery? Or is it a land whose beauty has been cursed by humanityrs"s greed and naturers"s cruelty? The answer is largely a matter of narrative and the narratorrs"s vision of Italy. The fifteen essays inNature and History in Modern Italyinvestigate that nationrs"s long experience in managing domesticated rather than wild natures and offer insight into these conflicting visions. Italians shaped their land in the most literal sense, producing the landscape, sculpting its heritage, embedding memory in nature, and rendering the two different visions inseparable. The interplay of Italyrs"s rich human history and its dramatic natural diversity is a subject with broad appeal to a wide range of readers.

Marco Armiero is a senior researcher at the Institute for the Study of Mediterranean Societies at the Italian National Research Council and a visiting scholar at Stanford University. 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 sciences at the University of Zurich and assistant professor of history at the University of Utah. His book Earth Repair: A Transatlantic History of Environmental Restoration received the Downing Book Award of the Society of Architectural Historians.