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La Bella Figura: A Field Guide to the Italian Mind
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About La Bella Figura: A Field Guide To The Italian Mind
Product Description Join the bestselling author of Ciao, America! on a lively tour of modern Italy that takes you behind the seductive face it puts on for visitors—la bella figura—and highlights its maddening, paradoxical true self You won’t need luggage for this hypothetical and hilarious trip into the hearts and minds of Beppe Severgnini’s fellow Italians. In fact, Beppe would prefer if you left behind the baggage his crafty and elegant countrymen have smuggled into your subconscious. To get to his Italia, you’ll need to forget about your idealized notions of Italy. Although La Bella Figura will take you to legendary cities and scenic regions, your real destinations are the places where Italians are at their best, worst, and most authentic: The highway: in America, a red light has only one possible interpretation—Stop! An Italian red light doesn’t warn or order you as much as provide an invitation for reflection. The airport: where Italians prove that one of their virtues (an appreciation for beauty) is really a vice. Who cares if the beautiful girls hawking cell phones in airport kiosks stick you with an outdated model? That’s the price of gazing upon perfection. The small town: which demonstrates the Italian genius for pleasant living: “a congenial barber . . . a well-stocked newsstand . . . professionally made coffee and a proper pizza; bell towers we can recognize in the distance, and people with a kind word and a smile for everyone.” The chaos of the roads, the anarchy of the office, the theatrical spirit of the hypermarkets, and garrulous train journeys; the sensory reassurance of a church and the importance of the beach; the solitude of the soccer stadium and the crowded Italian bedroom; the vertical fixations of the apartment building and the horizontal democracy of the eat-in kitchen. As you venture to these and many other locations rooted in the Italian psyche, you realize that Beppe has become your Dante and shown you a country that “has too much style to be hell” but is “too disorderly to be heaven.” Ten days, thirty places. From north to south. From food to politics. From saintliness to sexuality. This ironic, methodical, and sentimental examination will help you understand why Italy—as Beppe says—“can have you fuming and then purring in the space of a hundred meters or ten minutes.” Review Praise for Beppe Severgnini La Bella Figura “Don’t read this book—unless you have the courage to let Dottore Severgnini carve up your well-worn stereotypes about Italy. La Bella Figura proves that twenty-first-century Italians are more complicated than we thought. Sort of like Europeans. And Beppe loves them all.” —Howard Tomb, author of Wicked Italian “The book on perplexing Italians . . . Severgnini’s most systematic probe of the Italian psyche yet . . . A keen observer of human nature, [he watches] his compatriots with amused insight . . . Laugh-out-loud funny.” — International Herald Tribune Ciao, America! “A Bella Laugh . . . This wonderfully funny and perceptive book . . . now finds its way to the country that inspired it. What a pity it took so long to get here, but what a joy that it is here at last. Ciao, America! is fun from first page to last, pure and simple.” — The Washington Post “It’s not easy to walk the thin line between Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and Dave Barry’s Only Travel Guide You’ll Ever Need, but this memoir manages to do so admirably.” — Booklist “Severgnini is a master . . . Ciao, America! is a sardonic tale of cultural bewilderment, an incisive peek into the mundane obsession of our American existence that makes the commonplace seem not only insane but extremely funny.” — Publishers Weekly “A delightful read, full of wonderful anecdotes that capture the eye-opening absurdity of life in these United States.” — Chicago Tribune “It would be difficult not to like this delightful book.” — Library Journal About the Author beppe severgnini is a columnis
