Since unification, Italy has grown from a backward agrarian society into one of the world's leading industrial powers. Yet her history exhibits spectacular disunities, inconsistencies and paradoxes. Dominated by political Catholicism, she has also been home to Fascism, the mafia, and the largest Communist movement outside the Eastern Bloc. Her politics are notoriously fissiparous - yet policy itself never changes. Until now. This timely, absorbing and richly illustrated account of the historical development of the Italian nation-state traces the main paradoxes of what `Italy' has been, and questions what she may become.