John Foot: 6 books

The 2006 World Cup final between Italy and France was a down-and-dirty game, marred by French superstar Zidane's head-butting of Italian defender Materazzi. But viewers were also exposed to the poetry, force, and excellence of the Italian game; as operatic as Verdi and as cunning as Machiavelli, it...

'An enjoyable, highly readable history that manages to bring murky, often fiendishly complex events into the light' Sunday Times Italy emerged from the Second World War in ruins. Divided, invaded and economically broken, it was a nation that some claimed had ceased to exist. By the 1960s, Italy...

Cycling was a sport so important in Italy that it marked a generation, sparked fears of civil war, changed the way Italian was spoken, led to legal reform and even prompted the Pope himself to praise a cyclist, by name, from his balcony in St Peters in Rome. It was a sport so popular that it created...

This innovative textbook places Italy at the heart of modern European history, tracing the often difficult relationship between Italians, the State and the Nation. A breeding-ground for radical political and social organisations, Italy saw the emergence of the first Fascist movements seen on the world...

When the wind of the 1960s blew through the world of psychiatry In 1961, when Franco Basaglia arrived outside the grim walls of the Gorizia asylum, on the Italian border with Yugoslavia, it was a place of horror, a Bedlam for the mentally sick and excluded, redolent of Basaglia’s own wartime...

Transmissions of Memory: Echoes, Traumas and Nostalgia in Post-World War II Italian Culture discusses cultural products—films, poetry, fiction, architectural buildings, autobiographical writing, and social media—to individuate through them the dynamics of memory. The field of analysis is Italian...