wonders if the Risorgimento, the national unification of Italy under Garibaldi, Camillo Cavour and King Victor Emmanuel II, was successful, or even necessary. As the country's current woes deepen, Gilmour longs for a land divided into small states, with regions such as Venice emulating relatively new European states like the Netherlands (although not, presumably, the former Yugoslavia).

It is a provocative and at times puzzling argument that takes Gilmour right back to the peninsula's prehistory and the myth of Hercules rescuing a bull calf. In a tour de force opening, Gilmour provides a wonderful survey of the region's limitations. Uniquely positioned to invite invasion, Italy has few rewards from its limited and unpredictable Mediterranean fishing industry. Its mountains (which "many Italians detest") and rivers have tended to impede ratherwas truly communal, with little "barrier between public and private lives". There is a sparkling account of the Venetian Republic and its tragic surrender first to Napoleon, then the "aberration" of its incorporation into greater Italy. But Gilmour expends most of his ire on the chaotic, disorganised period of intense realpolitik that led to the creation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861 and which set the scene for the rise of fascism and the country's weak and corrupt postwar governments.

Gilmour insists that the Risorgimento was never inspired by a popular desire for national unity. Myth after myth is stripped away: Verdi was no real nationalist, his music carrying "a whiff of the fairground"; Cavour was indifferent to "what was happening in the peninsula beyond Piedmont"; King Victor