In the late 16th century, the popular Bolognese poet Giulio Cesare Croce published a comic romance, The Cunning Wiles of Bertoldo, about a crafty peasant trickster who finds himself at court. As Beppe Severgnini puts it, Bertoldo “posed as a champion of experience over education and of improvisation over preparation. He is the archetypal Italian who survives on his wits, the triumph of unpunished impudence. Well, Bertoldo is still with us. Now and then, he passes himself off as a town councillor or the director of something. Almost invariably, he wears a jacket and drives a flashy motor. He changes region, job and political party but not his way of working.”

Many Italians, and many foreigners who have lived in Italy, would agree there is something recognisably Italian about Bertoldo and his modern descendants. Disdain for authority and rules, charm concealing deviousness, quick wits and a devil-may-care individualism: aren’t these qualities unmistakably Italian? Perhaps so. But it is rarely wise to generalise about national characters. If anything, the point that emerges forcefully from the four books under review is that Italy makes little sense unless seen through the prism of its different regions and mentalities, and its fractured and not always happy past as a nation-state less than 150 years old. Italy, dismissed in 1847 as a mere “geographical expression” by Prince Metternich, its reactionary Austrian ruler, became a state 14 years later, but the people of the peninsula have never been entirely certain what it means to be “Italian” – or whether to be proud of it.