100 Books Like My Italian Bulldozer

In many ways, this sort of book has gone out of style since it was published in the 1960s.

It’s an opinionated and ambitious portrayal of the Italian psyche and culture. Barzini looks at his fellow Italians with a dispassionate eye and a healthy sense of irreverence, uncovering their foibles, hidden beliefs, superstitions, and great strengths as a culture.

For me, Italy is an eternal paradox. Just when you think you’ve worked it out, something happens that makes you do a double-take. This book helps you understand that paradox has been part of Italy’s identity since the very beginning.

She’s best known for her novel The Namesake, which was made into a film, and her first collection, The Interpreter of Maladies. They’re good. Read this one. As a side note, she also moved from the US to Italy, learned Italian, and began publishing in Italian. Her work has now been translated from Italian and back to English. This is, itself, astonishing. As is this book.

Again, this is technically a novel but reads, daringly, as short fiction. A woman, middle-aged, single, and childless, goes about her days in a large Italian city. She shops for groceries, chats with friends, thinks about her childhood, and thinks about aging. Each section is short, unadorned, perfect. You won’t believe how perfect. I love this book also because it’s so obviously “domestic fiction,” concerned with private life, with tiny moments of transition, but puts a solitary woman at the center. It is… show more.

It’s not often I’m moved to tears by an academic book, but this book did it for me by putting me in the shoes of a Florentine patrician trying to comfort his friend the night before his execution. The main historical source of the book is an extraordinary ‘how-to’ manual: the one used by the ‘comforting confraternities’ of 16th-century Bologna, men who volunteered to spiritually prepare condemned criminals for their final moments on earth and, in so doing, hopefully increase their chances of salvation. The book explains the various methods and tools that the comforter could use, including prayers, songs, and pictures, and reveals the complex rituals of execution that began long before the prisoner’s arrival at the scaffold. A moving account of the realities of historical capital punishment.

Migration is the great theme of the twenty-first century. Our experience has set historians on a quest to see how new the mass movement of peoples really is. Isayev’s book is one of the first full-length studies of migration in Roman times.

It is enormously wide-ranging, bringing together the evidence of archaeology and of Roman comedy and history with the insights of geographers and sociologists. We see populations transplanted against their will, enslaved prisoners, hostages, and refugees, but also settlers and traders trying to make their fortune, and explorers and travelling scholars. Best of all we explore the ways that Romans thought about this, sometimes encountering chillingly familiar hostility but more often positive views of new arrivals. Romans often thought of themselves as a city of immigrants, and saw their willingness to accept newcomers as one reason for their success. Isayev does a wonderful job of opening up this new… show more.

Historical fiction, when well-researched, sometimes brings us uncommon insight into people and their times. This is one of those rare cases.

Very little has been written in English about Maria Carolina of Austria, Queen of Naples and Sicily (later the Two Sicilies) as the consort of Ferdinando I de Bourbon, except in dynastic histories such as those of Harold Acton.

In the absence of a major biography, I recommend this book as a worthy introduction, tracing the queen’s steps and considering her actions as the power behind the throne.

The Silence is a psychological thriller with several layers. There are two timelines: present day, where the main character, Abby is a doctor, married with two daughters, and a ‘Then’ storyline set in the early 1990s when young Abby has been sent to Italy to stay with relatives in an old village house, following her mother’s suicide. Book clubs will be talking until midnight about multiple themes in this novel which include suicide and murder, what unsupervised children get up to, marital tension, blackmail, and the pressures of being a politician in a world of social media. Johnson is a talented author who deserves to be better known.

I wanted to include this book because it focuses not only on women in the Renaissance but on the particular experience of a Jewish woman living and writing in seventeenth-century Venice.

Even though the Venetian republic proclaimed justice and equality, those ideals did not extend to women nor to the thousands of Jews and other non-Christians who made their home in the city. As a Jewish woman, Sarra Copia Sulam had to navigate prejudice and suspicion on two fronts, yet she courageously defended herself and her faith in print.

The book does a wonderful job of showing how Sulam used her dexterous pen to take on her critics, and Westwater’s account reveals new biographical information about Sulam, her family, and Jewish life in the Renaissance.

Elmore Leonard is the master of the dialogue-driven novel.

In Pronto, the US Marshal Raylan Givens, who wears a cowboy hat and is a quick draw, defends a former bookie who is on the run in Italy. It’s the basis of the TV show Justified, which is also a great legal thriller.

Leonard always gives an authentic voice to his characters, whether they are a bookmaker on the run or a Marshal from Kentucky.

Whether or not one wants to make a case for the modern humanities deriving from the studia humanitatis in Renaissance Italy, it is undeniable that Renaissance humanism has been a source of endless fascination for humanities scholars. I enjoyed this book partly because it shows how this fascination led seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scholars to “recapitulate practices and mentalities that Italian Renaissance humanists pioneered.” It is such borrowing and reapplying that explains how a “humanistic tradition” could take shape. Another intriguing point is Celenza’s argument that this tradition has historically revolved as much around wisdom as about knowledge. While we modern academics know very well how to produce knowledge, what has happened to the wisdom part? Can the humanities survive, Celenza asks, without “reflection on the self and on life”?

Once a dictator dies, his statues might come down and his books might disappear from school curriculums, but his legacy can endure for generations. Mussolini was the man for whom the term “totalitarian” was coined, and he pioneered many of the techniques of domination that other dictators deployed later in the century. When it was all new, a lot of people thought he might be onto something and “Il Duce” even enjoyed the support of such famous figures such as Churchill and Gandhi. The sight of his bullet ridden corpse strung upside down outside an Esso gas station in Milan must have seemed like the ultimate fall from grace, an indelible image of his regime’s failure. But that was not the end of the story, and in this remarkable book, Luzzato explores what happened next — both to Mussolini’s corpse, and to his ideas, as they continued to linger on… show more.