The Dark Heart of Italy

An essential guide to the strange, sometimes sinister culture of contemporary Italy.

In 1999 Tobias Jones travelled to Italy, expecting to discover the pastoral bliss described by centuries of foreign visitors and famous writers. Instead, he discovered a very different country, besieged by unfathomable terrorism and deep-seated paranoia, where crime is scarcely ever met with punishment.

Now, in this fascinating travelogue, Jones explores not just Italy's familiar delights (art, climate, cuisine), but the livelier and stranger sides of the bel paese: language, football, Catholicism, cinema, television and terrorism. Why, he wonders, do bombs still explode every time politics start getting serious? Why does everyone urge him to go home as soon as possible, saying that Italy is a 'brothel'? And why do people warn him that 'Clean Hands' only disguise 'Dirty Feet'?

Auteur

Tobias Jones was born in Somerset in 1972. Having graduated from Jesus College, Oxford with a double first in English and History, he spent a year framing and selling antiquarian maps in a bookshop in Bloomsbury. He then joined the editorial team of the London Review of Books, before becoming a staff writer for the Independent on Sunday. In 1999 he emigrated to Italy, from where he has worked as a freelance journalist, writing essays and articles on Italy for Wallpaper, Prospect, Vogue, the Guardian, the LRB and the Independent on Sunday. He has since returned to the UK and his new book, Utopian Dreams, was published in 2007