Mondiale ma non troppo

The Storia mondiale dell’Italia is an interesting experiment in writing the history – or histories – of the peninsula from a supranational point of view. The book deliberately lacks a narrative logic; its aim is to search the distant or not so distant past for as many elements as possible supporting the idea of Italy as a cultural construct, down to the emergence of a national idiom and an Italian “character”. The geographical area in which this miscegenation takes place, however, is Europe much more than the world.