John Hooper presents the ideal companion for anyone seeking to understand contemporary Italy and the unique character of the Italians. Digging deep into their history, culture and religion, he offers keys to assessing everything from their bewildering politics to their love of life and beauty.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tens of thousands of Southern Italians and Sicilians immigrated to the American Gulf South. Arriving during the Jim Crow era at a time when races were being rigidly categorized, these immigrants occupied a racially ambiguous place in society: they were not considered to be of mixed race, nor were they “people of color” or “white.” In Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South, Jessica Barbata Jackson shows that these Italian and Sicilian newcomers used their undefined status to become racially transient, moving among and between racial groups as both “white southerners” and “people of color” across communal and state-monitored color lines. Dixie’s Italians is the first book-length study of Sicilians and other Italians in the Jim Crow Gulf South. Through case studies involving lynchings, disenfranchisement efforts, attempts to segregate Sicilian schoolchildren, and turn-of-the-century miscegenation disputes, Jackson explores the racial mobility that Italians and Sicilians experienced. Depending on the location and circumstance, Italians in the Gulf South were sometimes viewed as white and sometimes not, occasionally offered access to informal citizenship and in other moments denied it. Jackson expands scholarship on the immigrant experience in the American South and explorations of the gray area within the traditionally black/white narrative. Bridging the previously disconnected fields of immigration history, southern history, and modern Italian history, this groundbreaking study shows how Sicilians and other Italians helped to both disrupt and consolidate the region’s racially binary discourse and profoundly alter the legal and ideological landscape of the Gulf South at the turn of the century.

Examines the character and history of the Italian people.

For more than three years, Aline Coquelle, the well-known globe-trotting photographer, and Count Gelasio Gaetani d’Aragona Lovatelli, a member of one of the oldest aristocratic Italian families, have followed the map of Italy’s best wines. Guided by Gelasio, readers are introduced to a tribe of artistic and wine-loving amici who share their passion for their country’s heritage and bounty. The Italian Dream: Wine, Heritage, Soul is an escape into the effortlessly elegant Italian lifestyle, savoring wine behind the private gates of family castles and vineyards, from the foothills of the Alps to the hill towns of Tuscany to the relaxed southern seasides.

In this lively and engaging history, Stephen Puleo tells the story of the Boston Italians from their earliest years, when a largely illiterate and impoverished people in a strange land recreated the bonds of village and region in the cramped quarters of the North End. Focusing on this first and crucial Italian enclave in Boston, Puleo describes the experience of Italian immigrants as they battled poverty, illiteracy, and prejudice; explains their transformation into Italian Americans during the Depression and World War II; and chronicles their rich history in Boston up to the present day.

Italy is a country synonymous with style and beauty in all aspects of life: the rich history of Rome, Renaissance art of Florence, graceful canals of Venice, high fashion of Milan, signature pasta alla bolognese of Bologna, colorful architecture of Portofino and winking blue waters of Capri and the Amalfi Coast, among many others. Italians themselves live effortlessly amid all this splendor, knowing instinctively just the type of outfit to throw on, design element to balance, or delectable ingredient to add.

A guide to understanding the Italians which reveals their cultural curiosities and defining characteristics.