Best Books Set in Italy: Essential Fiction and Nonfiction

Italy has attracted English and American writers for centuries — as a space of sensory abundance, moral freedom, and historical weight that contrasts with the restraint and repressions of northern European culture. The best fiction set in Italy uses the country not merely as backdrop but as an active force: the light, the heat, the beauty, and the different moral atmosphere create characters who can do things — feel, desire, kill, transform — that they could not do at home.

The books listed here span the full range of the Italian literary tradition: from Forster’s Edwardian comedy to Ferrante’s unflinching contemporary realism, from Highsmith’s sun-soaked crime fiction to Ondaatje’s wartime Mediterranean.

The Essential List

My Brilliant Friend — Elena Ferrante (2011)

The essential contemporary Italy novel. Ferrante’s Naples — the rione, the poverty, the violence, the specific social world of post-war southern Italy — is the most fully realised Italian setting in recent fiction. The friendship between Elena and Lila, the novel’s central subject, is the most honest account of female friendship in contemporary literature: rivalrous, dependent, loving, and never fully understood by either party. The first of four volumes; start here.

The Talented Mr. Ripley — Patricia Highsmith (1955)

The most atmospheric Italy novel ever written. Highsmith’s Mongibello and Rome in the 1950s — the quality of light, the slow pace of Mediterranean life, the ease with which an American can move through European society on sufficient funds — create the conditions for Ripley’s transformation. The novel is simultaneously a study of class desire (Ripley wants Dickie’s life, not merely his money), a portrait of the mid-century European American expatriate world, and a psychological thriller of the first order.

A Room with a View — E.M. Forster (1908)

The most charming of the English novels set in Italy. Forster’s contrast between the spontaneity of Florence (where people kiss in the wheat fields and life is lived at the surface) and the repression of Surrey (where convention governs everything) is the structural joke that carries the novel’s serious argument about authenticity. Lucy Honeychurch’s choice between the conventional Cecil Vyse and the passionate George Emerson is really a choice between two ways of life. Still irresistibly readable more than a century after publication.

Beautiful Ruins — Jess Walter (2012)

Walter’s novel moves between a small village on the Ligurian coast in 1962 (where American actress Dee Moray arrives, apparently dying, and local innkeeper Pasquale Tursi falls in love with her) and present-day Hollywood (where a film producer’s assistant discovers a connection to events of fifty years before). The novel is about the gap between the stories we tell about our lives and the lives we actually live; the Italian setting — the coastal village, the light, the specific beauty of the Ligurian coast — gives the 1962 sections their atmosphere.

The English Patient — Michael Ondaatje (1992)

Ondaatje’s novel is set partly in the Italian countryside in the final months of World War II — a ruined villa near Florence, where a badly burned man of uncertain identity lies dying and three others are waiting for the war to end. The novel’s meditation on memory, identity, desire, and betrayal is expressed through the physical landscape of wartime Italy: the mines, the crumbling frescoes, the combination of beauty and destruction that characterises the villa and its surroundings. Won the Booker Prize.

Under the Tuscan Sun — Frances Mayes (1996)

Mayes’s memoir of buying and restoring a farmhouse in Cortona — and her discovery of Tuscan food, wine, landscape, and social life — is the most widely read account of expatriate life in Italy. The book is neither literary fiction nor travel writing but something between: a sustained love letter to Tuscany, specific about the practical details of Italian rural life while lyrical about the landscape and culture. The source of the expat-in-Tuscany genre.

Eat, Pray, Love — Elizabeth Gilbert (2006)

Gilbert’s memoir follows her year-long trip to Italy, India, and Indonesia after a painful divorce and depression. The Italian section — four months in Rome, learning Italian, eating everything, refusing to be productive — is the most enjoyable: Gilbert’s account of Italian food, language, and the specific quality of Roman pleasure is warm and funny. The book’s enormous popularity (it remained on the New York Times bestseller list for years) reflects the appeal of its premise: the permission to stop performing and simply experience.

Death in Venice — Thomas Mann (1912)

Mann’s novella follows the ageing novelist Gustav von Aschenbach, who travels to Venice for rest and becomes fatally obsessed with the beautiful Polish boy Tadzio on the beach at the Lido. The novella is about the relationship between artistic discipline and Dionysian excess, between northern European repression and Mediterranean abandon — Venice itself, with its beauty and its cholera epidemic, is the symbol of the dissolution that destroys Aschenbach. The most compressed and formally perfect of the books listed here.

Why Italy?

Italy has served as the great laboratory of English-language fiction because it offers the English-speaking imagination what the north cannot: excess, beauty, history, passion, and the possibility of transformation. The books listed here all use this possibility differently — Forster’s comedy, Highsmith’s crime, Ferrante’s realism, Ondaatje’s poetry — but they share the conviction that Italy does something to the people who encounter it, strips away the protections of northern habit and convention, and makes visible what was always most essential.