20 Best Non Fiction Books Of All Time I Love
Recently, I wrote about my favorite novels after reading 250 books over the past 10 years. In that post, I only compiled the best fiction
Italy has a way of making you feel nostalgic even if you’ve never been there. After all, you won’t find the Venice canals, artisan pizza of Naples, ancient Roman ruins, Milan’s fashion houses, Renaissance art galleries, or movies about the Sicilian mafia anywhere else. Somehow, Italy feels like a memory we all share.
For these reasons, Italy is one of the top-visited countries in Europe. Interestingly, this stat also shows how people are more attracted to visible cultural icons while other treasures remain in the shadows.
Speaking of the hidden treasures, it is one of the best Italian books that few know about.
So, how about we discuss the best books about Italy Itlay’s history, culture, and Italian literature’s place in the world, particularly in European literature? The best books on Italy will be both fiction and nonfiction.
The Tartar Steppe is one of the modern Italian classics published in 1940. The novel’s timing was particularly significant as Italy prepared to enter World War II under Mussolini’s Fascist regime in 1940.
The anticipation of glory and the passage of time of the main character perfectly summed up what was about to become. And that is hollow promises of fascist propaganda, just like Hitler in Germany.
This novel, set in Italy, tells the story of Giovanni Drogo, a young military officer assigned to Fort Bastiani, a remote outpost on the desert Tartar Steppe. What begins as a temporary assignment becomes a lifetime of waiting as Drogo waits for an enemy that might emerge from the northern desert.
The fortress becomes a character in the novel, with its rigid routines and mysterious atmosphere. Time moves strangely as years pass while the soldiers maintain their vigilant watch over the empty steppe, clinging to regulations that have lost meaning.
Although many chances come for Drogo to return to everyday life, something always holds him back, like the possibility that his moment of glory might come. The Tartar Steppe remains one of the best Italian novels of the time. There’s also an eerily similar and haunting short story, The Great Wall, by Ismail Kadare, that you can read on Granta magazine.
The Solitude of Prime Numbers is one of the best Italian books about the lives of two isolated individuals. The novel is excellent if you want to understand how solitude, human connection, and personal tragedies leave a lasting impact.
Alice and Mattia share an emotional connection despite their differences. This deep shared connection is due to their traumas, which leave them feeling like prime numbers—close yet always apart.
Alice is a ski accident survivor, and Mattia is a gifted but emotionally distant mathematician. Their bond in high school is intense, but it remains unspoken mainly due to shared feelings of loneliness and past scars.
The novel particularly focuses on how childhood trauma and social isolation can shape one’s entire life. However, the author’s use of mathematical concepts, especially prime numbers, makes this one of the best novels about Itlay on separateness and loneliness.
If you want to explore how childhood and growing up in challenging or unique environments make or break humans, you can check the best coming of age movies.
Some writers represent their countries, and others are bigger than their countries. Italo Calvino is one prime example who’s larger than Italy itself, just as Gabriel García Márquez is larger than Colombia. These are writers whose greatness extends beyond their homeland, and they make their countries famous through their literature.
Although Italo Calvino doesn’t have prestigious literary awards like Gabriel García Márquez or Orhan Pamuk of Turkey. However, his experimental and fantasy writings make him one of the best Italian writers in the postmodern genre.
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler is one of the best Italian novels. It revolutionizes the traditional concept of narrative by being a novel about reading a novel. The novel is written in the second person, “you,” as it follows two main characters: “you,” the Reader, and another reader, Ludmilla.
Both characters want to finish a book but are interrupted by different incomplete novels. Each time readers try to continue the story, they encounter a new beginning in a different novel. Eventually, each incomplete story leaves off at a moment of climax, leaving suspense.
This Italian novel shows Calvino’s brilliance in experimental fiction and playful storytelling approach. It challenges traditional narrative structures while celebrating the joy and frustration of reading.
Nobody knows who Elena Ferrante is, as this is a pseudonym. She has kept her identity secret. However, she shared in interviews that she was born in Naples. Her work, however, is not secret, as almost all her best Italian books are bestsellers.
My Brilliant Friend is her first novel of the Neapolitan Novels series and one of the best books on Italy. The story follows Elena and Raffaella, who grew up in a poor, violent neighborhood in Naples in the 1950s.
Their complex friendship, which has lasted over six decades, begins in elementary school and becomes the lens through which Ferrante explores post-war Italy, class struggle, and female identity. We experience the harsh reality of their working-class neighborhood, where domestic violence is common.
However, the complexity of female friendship, intimacy, jealousy, and deep love makes it one of the best historical fiction set in Italy. This historical fiction about Italy was also adapted into a TV show by the BBC. You can order the book on Amazon and watch the show on HBO Max.
The Eternal Feminine in Mexican movies and The Colors of the Mountain in Colombian movies are similar in that they pit childhoods and youths against an unjust and unkind world
The Eight Mountains is one of the most beautiful novels set in Italy. It is a novel about friendship, nature, and the search for meaning in life. It tells the story of Pietro, a city boy, and his childhood friend Bruno, who grows up in the remote mountains of the Italian Alps. They form a strong bond through their shared love of the wilderness despite coming from different worlds.
The Italian Alps are interesting here because they serve as a setting and a metaphor. For Pietro, the mountains are about escape and discovery. And for Bruno, they are a home and way of life.
As the two boys grow into men, their paths diverge, yet the mountains remain a central connection. This is one of the best books about Italy, about how our surroundings shape us, how friendships can endure despite distance, and how pursuing one’s inner self can take many forms.
Gomorrah is one of the best Italian books of modern times. It is a groundbreaking investigative work about a powerful criminal organization, Camorra. Unlike traditional books about the mafia, Saviano’s book combines journalism, autobiography, and literary reportage.
The book deeply studies how criminal enterprises work in ways one can only comprehend. Like the fashion industry, where counterfeit luxury goods are produced in illegal sweatshops. The drug trade on the port of Naples, where the Camorra controls shipping containers filled with drugs.
The book was a massive secret revelation, and truth always has consequences. After its publication, Saviano was put to life under permanent police protection due to death threats from the criminal organizations he exposed. At the same time, Gomorrah became one of the best books about Itlay, selling millions of copies worldwide.
Gomorrah was also adapted into a hit television series you can stream on Amazon. It was also adopted into a critically acclaimed movie you can stream on Amazon.
If you want to read the best historical fiction set in Italy, you shouldn’t even think of any other Italian novel. It remains one of the best Italian novels as a historical murder mystery unravels in an Italian monastery in 1327.
William of Baskerville is a Franciscan monk who investigates mysterious deaths alongside his novice, Adso of Melk. What begins as a detective story turns into an exploration of medieval theology, semiotics, the power of knowledge, and the nature of truth.
The novel’s title refers to a line from medieval Latin that suggests that abstract concepts may outlive physical reality, like a rose that lives briefly but whose name endures. This relationship between words and things, between signs and their meanings, runs throughout this one of the best books on Italian history.
Despite its intellectual complexity and historical depth, it became one of the best Italian books and an international bestseller. If you like novels that intermix philosophy, religion, murder mystery, and semiotics, you can read Russian literature books. You can also check out the best historical fiction books to find more novels like The Name of the Rose.
Pereira Maintains is one of the best Italian novels of modern times. Although the writer Antonio Tabucchi was Italian, he deeply loved Portugal. For his love of Portugal, he taught Portuguese language and literature at the University of Siena, Italy.
So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise if you find that this one of the best Italian novels is set in Portugal.
Dr. Pereira is an elderly journalist who manages the culture page of a second-rate evening newspaper in Lisbon during the summer of 1938. The novel’s unique narrative structure is framed as a testimony, with the phrase “Pereira maintains” appearing throughout the text.
At first, Pereira is content to translate 19th-century French stories and write about death and literature while ignoring the political turmoil around him. The turmoil in question Salazar’s dictatorship in Portugal and the rising fascism across Europe.
However, his comfortable isolation is disrupted when he meets Francesco Monteiro Rossi, a young man who stirs his political consciousness, and Dr. Cardoso, a doctor who introduces him to new ideas about personality and transformation. Gradually, Pereira begins to wake up to the reality of his times.
While American cinema has given us the iconic Sicilian Mafia movies like “The Godfather” and “Goodfellas,” The Day of the Owl is somehow more authentic and raw. After all, this Italian novel is a closer view of the Mafia from a Sicilian writer who understood its deep roots in his society.
In the beginning, there’s a murder at a bus stop in Sicily. Captain Bellodi is tasked with investigating the killing, but he faces the silence that protects the Mafia—what Sicilians call “omertà.” It became one of the best novels set in Italy as it is based on a real murder case.
The novel’s exciting aspect is not its emphasis on narrating the Mafia’s violence but how the mafia maintains its power through relationships involving politicians, businessmen, and ordinary citizens.
Another interesting fact about this best Italian book is that the writer wrote it decades before the high-profile Mafia trials of the 1980s.
For centuries, people have moved across rivers, continents, barren lands, and oceans. What was once a migration in old times has become immigration in modern times. In older times, the reason was food, but now, apart from food, people immigrate due to wars, climate change, and for better economic prospects.
In the Sea There Are Crocodiles is one of the best Italian novels. In it, Afghan refugee Enaiatollah Akbari emigrates from Afghanistan to Italy.
The novel’s origins are based on reality. When Fabio Geda met Enaiatollah Akbari in Turin and heard his story, he decided to transform the Afghan boy’s five-year struggle into one of the best Italian books that blends journalism with storytelling.
Enaiat is a 10-year-old when he finds his mother left him alone in Pakistan. This heartbreaking decision sets him on a journey that will take him through Iran, Turkey, Greece, and finally, Italy.
Working illegal jobs, hiding in cargo trucks, crossing mountains on foot, and facing the constant threat of deportation, Enaiat’s story is a testament to the harsh reality of how much one has to struggle for a peaceful life.
You can also explore migration more in books about Afghanistan.
Our discussion of the best Italian books reveals that Italian literature is diverse, historical, and based on reality.
And how could one forget about the Italian football team, which has won four FIFA World Cups? However, I recently discussed an interesting aspect of Italian football fans: Ultras.
Don’t know about Ultras? Check out my recent talk about the book Ultra: The Underworld of Italian Football in best soccer books.
If you have any particular best books on Italy or mainly historical fiction set in Italy, do leave a comment!
Recently, I wrote about my favorite novels after reading 250 books over the past 10 years. In that post, I only compiled the best fiction
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