Is Italy il bel paese-the beautiful country-where tourists spend their vacations looking for art, history, and scenery? Or is it a land whose beauty has been cursed by humanityu2019s greed and natureu2019s cruelty? The answer is largely a matter of narrative and the narratoru2019s vision of Italy. The fifteen essays in Nature and History in Modern Italy investigate that nationu2019s long experience in managing domesticated rather than wild natures and offer insight into these conflicting visions. Italians shaped their land in the most literal sense, producing the landscape, sculpting its heritage, embedding memory in nature, and rendering the two different visions inseparable. The interplay of Italyu2019s rich human history and its dramatic natural diversity is a subject with broad appeal to a wide range of readers.