Is Italy il bel paesethe beautiful countrywhere tourists spend their vacations looking for art, history, and scenery? Or is it a land whose beauty has been cursed by humanitys greed and natures cruelty? The answer is largely a matter of narrative and the narrators vision of Italy. The fifteen essays in Nature and History in Modern Italy investigate that nations 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 Italys rich human history and its dramatic natural diversity is a subject with broad appeal to a wide range of readers.