100 Best Italian Books of All Time

Eric Ripert

A fascinating study and still wholly relevant. [source]

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Astrophysicist, Author & Science Communicator

Which books should be read by every single intelligent person on planet? … The Prince (Machiavelli) to learn that people not in power will do all they can to acquire it, and people in power will do all they can to keep it. If you read all of the above works you will glean profound insight into most of what has driven the history of the western world. [source]

Ryan Holiday

Author

Of course, this is a must read. Machiavelli is one of those figures and writers who is tragically overrated and underrated at the same time. Unfortunately that means that many people who read him miss the point and other people avoid him and miss out altogether. Take Machiavelli slow, and really read him. Also understand the man behind the book–not just as a masterful writer but a man who withstood heinous torture and exile with barely a whimper. Machiavelli is a glimpse into a time when power was literal and out for public viewing–when he talks about making an example of someone, he doesn’t mean calling them out, he means putting their head on a pike. Don’t let that scare you because we’re not as far from that world as we’d like to think. Deny that at your own peril. [source]

Flora Pringle

I think Elena Ferrante writes brilliantly about the challenges of motherhood and building something for yourself. In the Neapolitan Novels she talks about her character breaking out of her poor, restrictive, mafia background through reading and learning. She breaks her boundaries and becomes an accomplished writer. In the third book particularly, Elena speaks fluently about the envy we feel of the accomplishments of others, the insecure we feel even in the traits that others so admire about us. The frustrations of motherhood and how it can impinge professional accomplishments whether we want it to or not. A powerful book. [source]

Nicole Baldinu

I didn’t want this book to end. And I’ve gone back and listened to the audio version in Italian too. I’m lucky that my second language is Italian, as I got to enjoy it twice over! This book was wildly successful and for good reasons, it has everything you’d want in a story, love, friendship, history, humor, sadness and tragedy. All in four delicious volumes that, again, you wish would keep going and going. [source]

Colin Thubron

Oh God. Well, officially it’s Marco Polo describing the cities of his travels to Kublai Khan. It’s been opined that every city he describes is a version of Venice, but I think that doesn’t really work. They seem to me to be marvellous imaginative fantasies, which sometimes reproduce states of mind. There are 40 or so cities described, all entirely imaginary I think, and that’s what’s so magical about them. But there are passages that are suggestive of something, and nearly always of the way memory works. It’s a very hard book to describe, because the cities are never just a description of a place. They all mirror states of mind and being. [source]

James Meek

It has different layers. The set-up is that Kublai Khan has conquered this vast empire; an empire so large that he, sitting at the centre of it, cannot know all the many parts of it. He can’t visit them, he can’t see them, and if he goes to one part all the other parts have changed. So he sits there at the centre of his empire and Marco Polo travels around and visits the various cities and comes back and describes them to Kublai Khan. [source]

Chris Walsh

The Inferno is the classic moment of people not wanting to talk about cowardice. [source]

Nick Havely

It is a close and reliable translation, with the original text on the facing page, and it also has excellent notes. [source]

Jenny Davidson

The premise of the book is that a group of young noblemen and -women, people of great privilege who have been able to flee the plague-ridden city, are telling each other stories to while away their time together in the luxurious villa to which they’ve retreated. The description of the plague in the frame narrative is very vivid and quite horrifying; it sets a dark tone. [source]

Marion Turner

The Decameron specifically is a story about ten people who decide to escape the plague by going to a lovely country house with their servants. They tell stories there: ten stories a day for ten days, so there are 100 stories. The stories tend to be very, very funny. A lot of them are very rude. [source]

Aleksandar Hemon

Levi regains reason, by treating his experience in Auschwitz as something that is subject to rational analysis. [source]

Andrew Cayley

Primo Levi was an Italian Jew and he was arrested as a member of the anti-fascist resistance towards the end of the war, after Germany had occupied Italy. He was deported to Auschwitz. He survived and then he wrote a book about his experiences there. This really is a book that everybody should be made to read because he very sensitively describes what people become in a concentration camp. [source]

David Blaine

Amazing. [source]

Tim Radford

It’s a life story by a chemist seen through the prism of an elemental substance. Some of it doesn’t work very well and some of it works very well. There’s a lovely chapter on iron that refers to the arrival of the Fascist era. There’s a much more personal account involving mine tailings and the extraction of precious metals from mine tailing, which he was employed at. That gives him a chance to contemplate the nature of matter itself and why the stuff that’s in the ground is the same as the stuff that actually composes our bodies. And why things that happen in chemistry can be subtly different if you alter the element that’s involved in the process. All of it is illuminating. You read it and you understand the world around you much better for having read even a sentence of Levi. [source]

William Fiennes

They’re a mixture of short stories and autobiographical essays, or essays in autobiography. Levi uses the elements from the periodic table as a way of organising memory. He uses 21 elements, each as a doorway or wormhole into a particular area of his experience, into a particular memory – but leaving out his time in Auschwitz, because he’d already written about that. You get his early interest in chemistry, his early experiments, the friends he studied with, the atmosphere of the laboratories and the characters of the professors who taught him. It’s about his interest in matter, the stuff the world is made of, as counterposed to spirit. He wrote another great book, The Wrench, which is a series of soliloquies from a mechanic called Faussone. Levi is the scribe as Faussone describes all these things he’s built – bridges, oil derricks – and the excitement of putting things together. In The Periodic Table, you also get that fascination with the stuff the world’s made of and we’re made of – the wonder of it. [source]

Paul Theroux

I chose this book because not many people know it – it’s hardly on every bookshelf. Carlo Levi was an Italian Jew from Florence, banished in the 1930s by the Mussolini government for criticising the war in Ethiopia. He is sent to the ends of the earth, and it happens that the ends of the earth in Italy is southern Italy. [source]

Paula Fredriksen

This is such a beautiful memoir. Levi was in political exile for a year under Mussolini, sent to a very impoverished town in the south of Italy. Levi himself is from Turin – aristocratic, well educated, left-leaning politically, very urban and urbane. This tiny dusty town shocks him, both its poverty and its class structure. [source]

Ryan Holiday

Author

Equally allegorical, I read The Little Prince for the first time which for some reason I’d never been exposed to before. If you’re in the same boat, read it. It’s short but great. [source]

Brandon Stanton

Brandon Stanton recommended this book on the podcast "The Tim Ferriss Show". [source]

Evan Goldberg

Phenomenal. [source]

Simon Mawer

This is one of the greatest books that I know. It is beautifully done. There is an anonymous narrator who is clearly based on Giorgio Bassani’s own experiences. Again, it is an oblique look at the fate of European Jews. [source]

Tim Parks

Of all the books that I have selected…this is the easiest to read as a novel and it’s the one that has the classic novel plot that will engage even the most ardent lovers of popular fiction. [source]

Michal Ptacek

My most favourite book is Godfather by Mario Puzo. I think it is even slightly more interesting and better than a movie which is almost perfect. Total masterpiece :) [source]

Nicky Cullen

That is such a tough question. I'm going to say The Godfather because I couldn't stop until it was finished. [source]

Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Family Lexicon, which is more like a novelized memoir, is a valuable testimony of how private life unfolded during Fascist Italy. [source]

Yiyun Li

You don’t need the author to say ‘And I experienced it like this… and I was changed by this event and then that event’, because you feel it yourself in the way she writes. [source]

Adam Maloof

In Cosmicomics, Calvino takes huge scientific ideas, transmutes time, and describes spectacular geological and astrophysical processes through the senses of the intrepid protagonist Qfwfq – but with fairy tale mastery instead of Hollywood false realism. [source]

Marcus Chown

It’s a series of short stories, or a novel really. But he’s doing something that no other novelist has ever done. He looks at the history of the universe, the history of life on Earth – all the major milestones – and he makes it human. [source]

Madhur Jaffrey

Marcella Hazan takes you by the hand. For example, if you are going to make a risotto she tells you what rice to buy. [source]

Nigel Slater

It’s not beautiful writing; I don’t read her for information; I don’t read her for a sense of place. I read Marcella Hazan purely for the way she writes her recipes…. There is no finer recipe writer. Her recipes are concise, they’re clear, they’re unfussy and she never leaves me in any doubt about what I’m supposed to be doing. [source]

Ruth Rogers

When people come to work at the River Café as a chef we ask them if they have read this, and if they haven’t we ask them to read it. [source]

Blake Gopnik

With Vasari, we begin thinking that artistic biography might matter. As much as we may want to resist the notion that biography is central to understanding art, it seems as though it is just inevitable – the life of the artist is an inevitable element in considering the art itself, as Vasari realised early on. [source]

Kenneth Bartlett

He invented art history as we know it…..Much of what we know, especially about the personal lives of the artists, comes from Vasari because there are no other sources. He got it from gossip and hearsay. That is how he did much of his research: by asking people who knew them or by asking somebody whose father had worked with them. [source]

Mark Zuckerberg

Founder/Facebook

Oh, it’s not a favorite book or anything like that, I just added it because I liked it. I don’t think there’s any real significance to the fact that it’s listed there and other books aren’t. But there are definitely books—like the Aeneid—that I enjoyed reading a lot more. [source]

Ryan Holiday

Author

I made an effort to read some classical poets and playwrights this year. The Aneiad was far and away the most quotable, readable and memorable of all of them. There’s no other way to put: the story is AMAZING. Better than the Odyssey, better than Juvenal’s Satires. Inspiring, beautiful, exciting, and eminently readable, I loved this. I took more notes on it that I have on anything I’ve read in a long time. [source]

Ted Turner

Founder/CNN

When I got to college, I was a classics major, and that was mainly the study of Greek - and to a lesser extent Roman - history and culture, and that fascinated me: the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid by Virgil. [source]