Is Italy il bel paese-the beautiful country-where tourists spend their vacations looking for art, history, and scenery? Or is it a land whose beauty has been cursed by humanity\u2019s greed and nature\u2019s cruelty? The answer is largely a matter of narrative and the narrator\u2019s vision of Italy. The fifteen essays in Nature and History in Modern Italy investigate that nation\u2019s long experience in managing domesticated 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 inseparable. The interplay of Italy\u2019s rich human history and its dramatic natural diversity is a subject with broad appeal to a wide range of readers.