You could probably spend more time reading these books about Italy than you’ll ever have to vacation there. Now, I’m not necessarily recommending that you give up your trip, but there is certainly an awful lot of good reading that can be done before you depart.

First, here are three books you may want to pack along with your toothbrush. Italy: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, edited by Lawrence Venuti (part of the Traveler’s Literary Companion series), introduces you to twenty-three of the best twentieth-century Italian short stories.

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Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects by Giorgio Vasari (who lived from 1511 to 1574 and seems to have invented the term “Renaissance” as applied to Italian art) presents a gossipy, opinionated look at many of the author’s famous friends and contemporaries, including painters, sculptors, and architects such as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Ghiberti.

Desiring Italy, edited by Susan Cahill, is a collection of writings about the country by a stellar (and remarkably diverse) group of women, including Muriel Spark, Florence Nightingale, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, to name just a few.






For a nice historical perspective, try Jeremy Black’s Italy and the Grand Tour, an assemblage of excerpts from letters and diaries of travelers in the early eighteenth century, when it was considered de rigueur to study the ruins of Italy, and Rome in particular.

In The Dark Heart of Italy: An Incisive Portrait of Europe’s Most Beautiful, Most Disconcerting Country, Tobias Jones, who left his native England to live in Italy in the 1990s, portrays a country that is far more complex than is usually seen in guidebooks or armchair travel accounts.

Italian American Barbara Grizzuti Harrison wrote Italian Days about traveling throughout Italy to acquaint herself with her ancestral homeland, and she gives us the benefit of her thoughts on art, architecture, and the Italian character (and characters) as she journeys from region to region.

Gary Paul Nabhan is an ethnobotanist who takes both a spiritual and scientific look at Italy in Songbirds, Truffles, and Wolves: An American Naturalist in Italy, as he travels from Florence to Assisi in the steps of St. Francis.

Poet and novelist Frances Mayes has made a name for herself writing about her love affair with Tuscany, where she bought and refurbished an abandoned villa in the village of Cortona. She tells the full story in Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy; Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life in Italy; and In Tuscany.

Take a look at a map of Italy and you’ll see that its shape resembles a boot. When I read Mark Rotella’s Stolen Figs and Other Adventures in Calabria, I wanted to put the book down immediately and make reservations to visit the toe of that boot. And so will you, because of Rotella’s cheerful and charming writing.

Two insightful and engaging books about the Italian character are Luigi Barzini’s The Italians (published originally in 1964) and That Fine Italian Hand by Paul Hofmann, Rome bureau chief for the New York Times.

For a picture of Italy during World War II, try Eric Newby’s Love and War in the Apennines, a memoir of the author’s experiences as an escaped prisoner of war in Italy, and Naples ’44 by Norman Lewis, who came to Italy as an intelligence officer and grew to love the chaotic, challenging, contradictory country. (He writes, “Were I given the chance to be born again, Italy would be the country of my choice.”)

If Venice is your destination, you won’t want to go without at least dipping into historian John Julius Norwich’s A History of Venice and immersing yourself in Jan Morris’s less daunting The World of Venice and Marlene de Blasi’s A Thousand Days in Venice. (Don’t miss her A Thousand Days in Tuscany: A Bittersweet Adventure, either.) And you’ll certainly want to take along some of the mysteries set there by Donna Leon, all featuring her Italian policeman sleuth, Commissario Brunetti, whose love of good food and despair about the political corruption in his native country play prominent roles in every book. Uniform Justice is a particularly good one, in which Brunetti is foiled at every turn by higher-ups in the government while seeking to discover the murderer of a student at a military academy. Others I’ve enjoyed a lot include Acqua Alta, Death at La Fenice, and A Noble Radiance. Michael Dibdin also sets his superior mysteries in Italy, and one of my favorites, Dead Lagoon, has Italian policeman Aurelio Zen traveling back to his native Venice from Rome to investigate the disappearance of a wealthy businessman. (Other good Aurelio Zen novels are Medusa, Così fan Tutti, and A Long Finish.)

R. W. B. Lewis, who wrote an award-winning biography of Edith Wharton, lived in Florence with his wife for many years, and The City of Florence: Historical Vistas and Personal Sightings is the result of his love affair with the city, its past and its present. Other good books about Florence—its art, architecture, and people—include Mary McCarthy’s The Stones of Florence and Ross King’s Brunelleschi’s Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture.

I had to troll the used-book world to find a copy of The Hand of Michelangelo by Sidney Alexander, a novel that ranks right up there with the other great biographical novel about Michelangelo, Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy. (You’ll want to read Ross King’s nonfiction Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling along with these.)

Another good novel about Italy is Robert Harris’s historical thriller Pompeii. Even though you know the outcome—Mount Vesuvius is definitely going to erupt and bury Pompeii and Herculaneum—you’ll still find yourself turning the pages maniacally, eager to find out what happens to the characters.

Three other contemporary novels I thoroughly enjoyed were Italian Fever by Valerie Martin; Any Four Women Could Rob the Bank of Italy by Ann Cornelisen (who also wrote Torregreca: Life, Death, and Miracles in a Southern Italian Village, about her experiences setting up a nursery school in an impoverished section of the country); and Francesca Marciano’s Casa Rossa.

A whole category could be devoted to good books on Italian cooking, but the one you must read (and drool over, while thinking ahead to great meals) is Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.