The new book on Italy by bestselling author Petra Reski paints a political, social and cultural portrait of a country that is more familiar and foreign to us than any other.
"I describe Italy from the perspective of a non-Italian - a German who experiences Italy's seemingly confusing political development not from a distance, but up close." In her book, Petra Reski tells the story of Italy's development since 1989 and her own. She has lived half her life in Italy and, following the great success of her Venice book, is now continuing the series with a cheerful, melancholic and enlightening book about Italy. She reports from courtrooms, prisons and petrochemical plants, from palazzi, withered olive groves and ancient ruins, from railway compartments, sacristies, from the sofas of escorts - and not least from the dining tables. Like a few Germans, she took her love for Italy seriously and married an Italian. She experienced and shared Italy's struggles, she wanted to be more than just a spectator and became Italian, partly so that she could vote in Italy. The years-long battle with the Italian bureaucracy over citizenship is representative of the struggle with a nation whose history and stories are linked to those of Germany in so many different ways.
