Italy generates more travel writing, literary fiction, and history than almost any other country. Here are the books most worth carrying.
Travel and memoir
Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes is the obvious one — an American restoring a Tuscan farmhouse. It is warm and evocative even if it has spawned a thousand imitations. Her follow-up Bella Tuscany is equally good.
Italian Hours by Henry James is a collection of travel essays from the 1870s–1900s. Overwrought in places, but James captures Venice, Rome, and Florence with a precision that still holds.
Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi is part memoir, part ethnography: Levi was exiled by Mussolini to a remote village in Basilicata in the 1930s and wrote one of the great accounts of the rural south. Essential reading before visiting Matera or anywhere off the main circuit.
Italian Ways by Tim Parks is a travelogue structured around train journeys. Parks has lived in Italy for decades and writes about the country with affection and clear eyes — the bureaucracy, the regionalism, the particular quality of Italian life.
Fiction
The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa follows a Sicilian aristocrat navigating the upheaval of unification in the 1860s. One of the great Italian novels, with a portrait of Sicily that still resonates.
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante is the first of four Neapolitan novels tracing two women's lives from a poor Naples neighbourhood across the second half of the 20th century. Absorbing and intelligent; read them before or after visiting Naples.
Death in Venice by Thomas Mann is short but unforgettable: a German writer's obsession in a cholera-ridden city. Read it on the vaporetto.
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco is set in a medieval Italian monastery and structured as a murder mystery. Dense and rewarding.
History
SPQR by Mary Beard covers Rome across nine centuries with a focus on ordinary life rather than imperial biography. Excellent preparation for the Forum and Colosseum.
The Pursuit of Italy by David Gilmour is a history of Italy's complicated unification and continued fragmentation — why the country works better as a collection of city-states than as a unified nation. Illuminating and occasionally funny.
Midnight in Sicily by Peter Robb is a long meditation on the Mafia, Sicilian culture, art, and food. Dense and idiosyncratic, but the best introduction to Sicily's complicated identity.
Food
The Silver Spoon (Il Cucchiaio d'Argento) is the Italian household bible of cooking, first published in 1950. If you want to cook Italian properly rather than the bastardised versions that escaped abroad, this is where to start.