“There is a word that seems to best define the phase we are in, and which I have decided to adopt as my compass for writing and reading. The word is perception. Lately, this difficult word has become a pacific protagonist of the journalistic lexicon and of everyday news. In the ‘virtual'reality that has infiltrated our and envelops our society, what counts is what one ‘perceives’, not the fact in itself. On the contrary, it now seems charming to shrug our shoulders at the ‘fact in itself’. The facts we are dealing with are – apparently – only perceptions. We live as though they were true, therefore they are true for us. If they are true, we tell ourselves, then that is exactly how things have gone. For ‘them’ – a large number of men and women, across several generations, up until us – Italy was once really there, genuine public space for their collective and even individual, being and existence. This is what I will write, a history of Italy as it has been gradually perceived and recounted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries”.

 It is from this perspective, from the accounts of intellectuals, patriots and politicians who took part in the construction of the nation, from the texts that together make up the collective story of our identity, that Mario Isnenghi weaves his history of Italy, from Alessandro Manzoni up to events in recent decades.