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 humanity’s greed and nature’s cruelty? The answer is largely a matter of narrative and the narrator’s vision of Italy.
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.
“The first stop for anyone wishing to learn about Italian
environmental history.”
*Environmental History*
“There is currently no such thing as a coherent synthetic history
of Italian environmental particularities such as landslides,
deforestation, the early established but inadequate areas of
preserved ‘wilderness,’ the wild zones of massive toxic pollution,
and the distinctive landscape symbolism of a late-unifying
nation-state. So, this book is to be welcomed as much for its
pioneering quality as for the intellectual strengths and empirical
interest of its various chapters.”
“For readers interested in a detailed portrait of how geography and
population interact—with particular reference to the
environment—and the impact of each on the other, this book offers a
complex, yet convincing, portrait of modern Italy.”
*CHOICE*
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