I'm an American historian who will be visiting northern Italy this summer and I'm looking for book recommendations to help me prepare for my visit. Ideally, I'd like to find a great one-volume monograph summarizing Italian history but I know that's a difficult proposition. I'll be visiting Brescia, Verona, Ravenna, Milan, and Lake Garda, and I'd love to have some historical context for the sights I'll be seeing, so that's everything from Roman and Byzantine architecture and churches to post-WWII economic redevelopment and reconstruction. Any ideas? Thanks!
There are several collections of books on this topic, among which the Longman History of Italy (Italy in the Age of…) and the Short Oxford History of Italy. The advantage of the Longman Histories is that each volume is written by a single author, while the Oxford Histories are collective works, which makes far more difficult to understand the narrative without any prior knowledge (or even with some, actually). The Longman Histories have the additional benefit of being reasonably short (~ 250 p. of text by volume). I found Italy in the Age of Dante and Petrarch (Longman, by John Larner, 1980) to be well-written and smart*, even though I have no idea of how it has stood the passage of time with regard to its scholarship and, more importantly, if the series as a whole is as interesting. All these collections, however, start in the 5th century, and rarely discuss Roman and pre-Roman Italy.
*though a bit light on cultural history, paradoxically.
I would like to tag this for an eventual response. I'll be visiting the area around Genoa and Nice doing some work and I know nothing of the area.