ItalyLogue Book Reviews

Looking for Italy-themed books to help fill the time when you’re not actually in Italy? Here are a few Italy books I’ve read and reviewed. Titles link to my reviews, and the Amazon links go to the books themselves.

Photography Books
“VenicExposed” by Luca Campigotto (Amazon)
“Vucciria” by Mauro d’Agati
“In Etna’s Shadow” by Karen Landes (Amazon)
“Tutta Roma” by Martin Parr (Amazon)

Italy Guidebooks
“Italy: Instructions for Use” by Nan McElroy (Amazon)

Nonfiction
“The Secrets of Rome” by Corrado Augias (Amazon)
“Miss Expatria” by Christine Cantera (Amazon)
“Winning at All Costs: A Scandalous History of Italian Soccer” by John Foot (Amazon)
“A Season With Verona” by Tim Parks (Amazon)

More Italy books worth reading

A few more for the pile, some older favorites and some newer ones, all easy to find in English:

• “My Brilliant Friend” by Elena Ferrante: the first of the four Neapolitan novels, about two girls growing up in a poor neighborhood of Naples. Read it before you go to Naples and the city will look different.
• “La Bella Figura: A Field Guide to the Italian Mind” by Beppe Severgnini: a Corriere della Sera columnist explains his own countryan Italian journalist explains his own country to foreigners, one place at a time (the bar, the train, the piazza). Funny and still accurate.#8217;s habits to foreigners. Funny, and most of it still holds.
• “Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo” by Tim Parks: the author of “A Season With Verona” rides the Italian rail network from end to end. Required reading if you’ve ever tried to understand a Trenitalia ticket.
• “Pasta, Pane, Vino” by Matt Goulding: a food writer eats his way through Italy region by region, from Roman trattorias to Sicilian street food.
• “Taste: My Life Through Food” by Stanley Tucci: a memoir built around Italian-American family cooking, with recipes.
• “The Eight Mountains” by Paolo Cognetti: a short novel about a friendship that plays out over decades in a village in the Aosta Valley Alps.

Plus, check out my Reading List for Italophiles: especially helpful for anyone who’s got dreams of living in Italy.