The Oxford History of Italy.

George Holmes, editor Oxford University Press, $45, 380 pp

The architect Charles Moore once said to my brother, also an architect, that "going to Italy is like going home." Those of us who make regular pilgrimages to Italy may feel the truth of Moore's observation, but do we understand it? What kind of home can this be, especially for those not of Italian origin?

The Oxford History of Italy offers some answers to that question. Composed of twelve chapters by as many different authors, most of whom teach in British universities, the volume covers the story of Italy from the reign of the Emperor Augustus to 1994, when the coalition government headed by media magnate Silvio Berlusconi collapsed. The chapters follow the fairly standard divisions of Italian history: classical antiquity beginning with Augustus; the Middle Ages (400-1250); the Renaissance (1250-1600); the Age of Baroque and Rococo (1600-1796); the Risorgimento (1796-1870); and the periods 1870-1915; 1915-45; and 1945-94. With only two exceptions, each historical period is covered by two chapters, one devoted to politics and society, the other to culture.

It is a real challenge to tell the full story of Italy well because the striking clarity, of her cultural achievements is matched by the confusing complexity of her history. That history is not only longer and richer than most other nations possess; it is characterized by greater political fragmentation. With the exception of the chapters on classical antiquity and the Middle Ages, which would be improved by more depth and better focus, the volume as a whole succeeds surprisingly well in creating a unified narrative. It is especially good at both highlighting the interplay among economics, politics, and culture during particular eras, and linking all the periods through the interrelated themes of politics and artistic creativity.

Political fragmentation contributed to artistic achievement, but would have been unable to do so were it not for another element of prime importance in the history of Italy: the interplay among conflicting inherited cultures. As the editor George Holmes puts it: "Of all European countries Italy has been the one with the richest and most varied cultural life, the result of the fact that there have been so many separate centers of art and thought, independent enough to preserve their own individuality. There were of course other reasons for the particular importance of Italy in the cultural history of Europe: the long ancient history of civilized life from the Etruscans and Greek settlers onwards, the legacy of Rome to the medieval world. It is impossible to imagine Italy without the backing of layer upon layer of ancient culture, which makes it quite different from other parts of Western Europe and gave Italian society an extra sophistication."

The essays that cover the Renaissance through the Baroque and Rococo periods discuss the particular genius of Italian culture, including the ways in which it was exported to other countries. These chapters exemplify both the depth of thinking and lucidity of narrative this book attains. The Renaissance spans the rise of independent communes and later city-states in northern and central Italy, the consolidation of the papacy, and the rise of large kingdoms in the south, all to be transformed again when the kings of France and Spain turned Italy into a battleground for their own armies in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Michael Mallett describes and analyzes these changes with masterly clarity in his essay on "Politics and Society 1250-1600." The cultural complement to Mallett's piece, George Holmes's chapter on "Renaissance Culture," explains why the Italian Renaissance remains one of the high points of human creativity and why going to Italy is like going home.

Around 1347 Petrarch wrote the Secretum, a dialogue between Saint Augustine, who argues that this life is merely a preparation for death, and Francis (Petrarch), who speaks of his attachment to earthly glory. The book ends with the debate unresolved: Petrarch was still attached to his love poetry and his desire for fame, and yet deeply worried that the monastic life, as Holmes puts it, was the true purpose of humanity. Holmes goes on to observe that in the Secretum, Petrarch "gave a picture of the underlying dilemma which was to run unsolved through the whole of Renaissance culture: How to reconcile the worldly purposes based on literary humanism derived from pagan Rome with the Christian self-denial and devotion to heaven preached by the religious orders. Both were strongly rooted movements in the Italian world. . . ." He points to the Florentines Dante, Marsilio Ficino, and Michelangelo, and to the Venetians Giovanni Bellini and Titian as further examples of the "divided thought-world, classical and Christian at the same time," of Italian Renaissance culture. Holmes argues that the problem of harmonizing the two was insoluble, but that the very tension, coming from the immense power of each tradition, created works of art - statues, paintings, poems, and churches - that made the Italian Renaissance one of the greatest creative periods in human history.

Stuart Woolf's chapter on "Italy 16001796," followed by Robert Oresko's companion essay "Culture in the Age of Baroque and Rococo," provide further answers to Italy's cultural predominance. These "Forgotten Centuries" of foreign domination, economic crises, the Counter Reformation, and the Enlightenment were also centuries of important public and private artistic patronage. Italians in all the arts attained new levels of craftsmanship and virtuosity, and began to work throughout Europe. Saint Petersburg, for example, was largely the work of Italian architects. Once again Italian culture, as it had in Roman times, became the common heritage of Europe.

Postmodernism has been characterized in part as ethical and cultural relativism, linked to a disregard for the past. The history of Italy shows the contrary: a deep, perhaps unavoidable regard for history, and a lived confrontation and amalgamation of two cultures that are anything but relativistic concerning questions of beauty and truth: classical antiquity and Christianity. Italy's attraction today may be due in large measure to our unacknowledged longing for spiritual roots and certainties, and our intuition that beauty and truth are indeed related.

Robert E. Proctor is a professor of Italian at Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut.