Product Description

The greatness of Italy's culture and way of life have had a powerful attraction for many generations of visitors. This has created an overwhelming sense that Italy is a fundamentally benign and easy going country. The Force of Destiny, Christopher Duggan's immensely enjoyable new book, lays waste to this idea. While sharing everyone's enthusiasm for Italy as a place, he strongly distinguishes this from its political role over the past two centuries, which has been both vicious and ruinous for Europe as a whole.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #85407 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 688 pages

Spectator, Books of the Year
'Brilliant'

Michael Burleigh, Literary Review
'Indispensable ... deserves to be the standard history of modern Italy for the foreseeable future'

Ian Thomson, Daily Telegraph
'A pleasure to read, and an enduring tribute to Italy's struggle to free itself from foreign occupation and unite as a nation'

Customer Reviews

A force yet to be fulfilled
A readable one-volume history of Italy since 1796. Duggan explains so well the poor constitutional decisions, made after Unification in 1860, as to give a sense of tragic inevitability by the time you get to the rise of Mussolinis Fascists. A major part of the problem is the attempted imposition, by a ruling elite, of the idea of nationhood on a population unwilling to share that vision, exacerbated by the repeated attempts to attain this by resort to force of arms, mostly with tragic consequences. Seldom does a history end with such a downbeat footnote, Duggan stating (p587)that the idea of "Italy" appears "...still too uncertain and contested an idea to provide the emotional core of a nation", uncannily echoing Metternichs 1847 description of Italy as only a geographical expression. The book is an excellent explanation of why Italy is as she is now. I also appreciate, as here, good maps in a history.

A readable and informative history of Italy
I have been searching for a book that provides a detailed history of Italy from 1860 independence to the current troubled present day. This book definitely meets that need. The author makes the history interesting and very readable.