Italy: The Enduring Culture offers an insightful and fascinating look at the history, culture and society of this betwitching country. Jonathan White charts the formation of modern Italy, from the rapid rise of powerful merchant cities in Dante's time to millenial change in the present technological age, exploring how modern culture and society in Italy have emerged from earlier configurations.

White looks specifically at how Italy has incorporated and continually represents its past. He reveals the ambivalence of the city of Venice as a living myth, its water-bound houses functioning alternately in the collective mind as figures of decadance and death and as signs of life, fulfilment and the birth of the future. The book explores the age-old culture of death in Sicily in the light of Mafia killings of public figures and aspects of Italian society and culture that include class, economics, politics, opera and literature. It also considers, in the context of Italian emigration, what qualities of Italianness survive in the espresso bars, luxury goods and musical culture of these far-flung Italian communities.

Affordable, fascinating and fully-illustrated throughout, this is the ideal book for anyone interested in Italian history, society and culture.