Nature and History in Modern Italy

by Marco Armiero (Editor), Marcus Hall (Editor)

Overview

Is Italy il bel paese—the beautiful country—where tourists spend their vacations looking for art, history, and scenery? Or is it a land whose beauty has been cursed by humanity’s greed and nature’s cruelty? The answer is largely a matter of narrative and the narrator’s vision of Italy. The fifteen essays in Nature and History in Modern Italy investigate that nation’s long experience in managing domesxadtixadcated rather than wild natures and offer insight into these conflicting visions. Italians shaped their land in the most literal sense, producing the landscape, sculpting its heritage, embedding memory in nature, and rendering the two different visions inseparxadable. The interplay of Italy’s rich human history and its dramatic natural diversity is a subject with broad appeal to a wide range of readers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780821419168
Publisher:	Ohio University Press
Publication date:	08/15/2010
Series:	Ecology & History
Edition description:	1
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Marco Armiero is a senior researcher at the Institute for the Study of Mediterranean Societies at the Italian National Research Council and a visiting scholar at Stanford University. He has published extensively on Italian environmental history and edited Views from the South: Environmental Stories from the Mediterranean World.

Marcus Hall is senior lecturer in environmental sciences at the University of Zurich and assistant professor of history at the University of Utah. His book Earth Repair: A Transatlantic History of Environmental Restoration received the Downing Book Award of the Society of Architectural Historians.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Foreword Donald Worster xi

Acknowledgments Il Bel Paese xv

An Introduction Marco Armiero Marcus Hall 1

Foundations

Chapter 1 The Distinctive Character of Italian Environmental History Piero Bevilacqua 15

Chapter 2 Upside-Down Landscapes Seismicity and Seismic Disasters in Italy Emanuela Guidoboni 33

Chapter 3 Moving Ground Vesuvius and the Nola Mudslides of the Nineteenth Century Walter Palmieri 56

Chapter 4 Environmental Imperialism in Sardinia Pesticides and Politics in the Struggle against Malaria Marcus Hall 70

Commons And Forests

Chapter 5 The Decline of the Commons and the Environmental Balance in Early Modern Italy Gabriella Corona 89

Chapter 6 Forest Visions in Early Modern Italy Bruno Vecchio 108

Chapter 7 Environmental Heritage of a Past Cultural Landscape Alder Woods in the Upper Aveto Valley of the Northwestern Apennines Roberta Cevasco 126

Chapter 8 Act Locally, Think Nationally A Brief History of Access Rights and Environmental Conflicts in Fascist Italy Wilko Graf Von Hardenberg 141

Pollution, Industry, And Urban Environment

Chapter 9 Dealing with Industrial Pollution in Italy, 1880-1940 Simone Neri Serneri l6l

Chapter 10 Petrochemical Modernity in Sicily Salvatore Adorno l80

Chapter 11 The Seveso Disaster Legacy Laura Centemeri 195

Landscape, Culture, And Environmentalism

Chapter 12 A "Natural" Capitalism Water and the Making of the Italian Industrial Landscape Stefania Barca 215

Chapter 13 Nationalizing the Mountains Natural and Political Landscapes in World War I Marco Armiero 231

Chapter 14 Nature Preservation and Protection in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Italy, 1880-1950 Luigi Piccioni 251

Selected Bibliography 269

Contributors 279

Index 283

Editorial Reviews

The first stop for anyone wishing to learn about Italian environmental history.”—Environmental History


“There is currently no such thing as a coherent synthetic history of Italian environmental particularities such as landslides, deforestation, the early established but inadequate areas of preserved ‘wilderness,’ the wild zones of massive toxic pollution, and the distinctive landscape symbolism of a late-unifying nation-state. So, this book is to be welcomed as much for its pioneering quality as for the intellectual strengths and empirical interest of its various chapters.”—John Agnew, UCLA, author of Places and Politics in Modern Italy


“For readers interested in a detailed portrait of how geography and population interact—with particular reference to the environment—and the impact of each on the other, this book offers a complex, yet convincing, portrait of modern Italy.”—CHOICE

From the Publisher