By Arts & Culture Editor Joan Kirschner
Italy is composed of 20 regions with variations in their topography, food, and language, among the many other factors that make them highly distinctive. With a civilization dating back through the millennia to antiquity, every region offers views into history and art that have long captivated visitors. Florence and the smaller cities of the North, Venice, Rome, the Amalfi Coast including Capri, Positano and Sorrento, and Sicily are some of the most popular destinations.
Through books, movies, and streaming series, we can explore Italy’s many treasures while never leaving home.
Fiction
Novelist Laura Morelli is also an art historian and travel specialist. The subject of The Last Masterpiece is the race during World War II between the Allies to protect and the Nazis to steal European art treasures, especially those in Florence. In The Stolen Lady, the “lady” in question is the Mona Lisa. The novel moves between Leonardo da Vinci’s Renaissance Florence and Louvre employees in Paris hiding his masterpiece and other works during the war.
Jeanne Kalogridis’s tempestuous historical novels include I, Mona Lisa, set in fifteenth century Florence. Lisa di Antonio Gherardini, better known as Mona Lisa, tells the story.
Lisa Scottoline’s crime novels feature Italian American female protagonists, but her first foray into historical fiction, Eternal, centered on fascist Rome during World War II. Upcoming: a contemporary thriller set in Tuscany.
Jacqueline Park was a Canadian author whose The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi was the first in a trilogy that moves from Renaissance Italy to Ottoman Turkey and back to the Venetian Republic.
The House at the Edge of Night by Catherine Banner is an enthralling mix of history, fantasy, romance and art set on a small island off the coast of Sicily.
Return to Valetto by Dominic Smith follows a widowed professor who returns to his ancestral Umbrian village to claim a disputed inheritance.
Murder in an Italian Café by Michael Falco is an easy-going contemporary murder mystery set in glorious Positano.
The prolific Adriana Trigiani has set several of her books in Italian locales, as well as Pennsylvania, Greenwich Village, and her native Virginia.
Non-Fiction
The late American journalist/essayist Barbara Grizzuti Harrison’s Italian Days, an idiosyncratic memoir of her travels through Italy, won the American Book Award in 1990.
Jan Morris, a Welsh journalist, originally published Venice in 1960 (revised 1990). She spent a year there and captured its timelessness and mystery in her very personal account.
Kate Simon was an American travel writer, whose 1984 Italy, The Places in Between explored what were then lesser-traveled destinations including Siena, Verona, and Padua. Her 1972 Rome, Places & Pleasures includes walking tours that define its nickname, The Eternal City.
Television
A compelling adaptation of the acclaimed four Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante in the series “My Brilliant Friend”, filmed in Neapolitan dialect and Italian and on location in Naples, Florence, Pisa, and Ischia. It traces the relationship of best friends Elena (Lenu) and Raffaella (Lila) from childhood onward, beginning in their struggling, violent neighborhood in 1950s Naples, and narrated by Lenu, a successful novelist, looking back from her 60s. HBO, with subtitles.
Movies
Italy has a long and acclaimed history in filmmaking and has also been the setting for many English-language films.
Italian films to revisit…
Night of the Shooting Stars, 1982
Cinema Paradiso, 1989
Mediterraneo, 1991
Il Postino, 1994
Life Is Beautiful, 1997
Italian settings…
Roman Holiday, 1953
Summertime, 1955
It Started in Naples, 1960
A Room with a View, 1985
Enchanted April, 1991
Much Ado About Nothing, 1993
Only You, 1994
Tea with Mussolini, 1999
Joan Kirschner is a Boston area writer and editor who reviews books, museum exhibitions, theater, film, music, and travel experiences. Her commentary previously appeared on SonsiWoman.com, UllaPopken.com, WomenofGloucesterCounty.com, Trazzler.com, and IndieReader.com. She attributes a lifelong love of reading and cultural events to parents who encouraged her early on. Joan began as a retail and mail order catalog copywriter in the pre-digital age. She advanced through the ranks and changes in technology, adding corporate communications, social media, and digital advertising and promotion to her experience. Surrounded by the babble of languages in Manhattan and Brooklyn and sympathizing with the challenges of non-English speakers, she earned a certificate in the Teaching of English as Second Language (TESOL) and added a second career teaching and tutoring adults and college students. Joan now works part-time in grants administration, is a reviewer at Reader Views and covers books and the arts on her blog, No Shortage of Words