Why is Italy still riven with internal conflict? And why does one man - Silvio Berlusconi - appear to own everything from Padre Nostro to Cosa Nostra?
Tobias Jones set out to answer these and other questions during his three-year voyage across the Italian peninsula. What emerges is not a book about the tourist concerns of climate, cuisine and art, but one about the much livelier and stranger sides of the 'Bel Paese': the language, football, Catholicism, cinema, television and terrorism - and the grip exercised by Berlusconi through his vast media empire and Presidency of the Republic.
The Italy Tobias Jones discovers is a country which is proudly 'visual' rather than 'verbal', and where crime is hardly ever followed by punishment. It's a place of incredible illusionism, where it's impossible to distinguish fantasy from reality, fact from fiction.
