Not a lot to say about this one.
I liked this for pretty dumb reasons. There is a lot of bad blood between Italy and France. Pratchett has a quote that refers to a married couple as (something to the effect of) two people accusing the other of snoring. That’s more or less what Italy and France are like; we are both looking towards the border and saying that the other goes on strike too much. So it does seem rare that a French author would go on at length about any kind of Italian virtue.
Out of Italy goes at length about a particularly virtuous 200 year period of Italian history, where the peninsula was the most important cultural and economic hub in the world (or at the very least, Europe). Its the period from about 1450-1650, and you wouldn’t expect that to be a period Italy would be proud of, particularly being about 200 years too early for the birth of the modern notion of Italy as a singular state. And still, it is the period of time that gave us things like opera as an artistic genre. It was also the period of Caravaggio and Bernini, but also Galileo. It also had a lot of trade dominance throughout Europe.
This was a short read, and I picked up mostly because I found it lying around and was curious about it. If you are interested in Italian history, its a pretty interesting take.
Failures in Polymathy 