{"product_id":"9781466804517","title":"The Dark Heart of Italy: An Incisive Portrait of Europe's Most Beautiful, Most Disconcerting Country","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn 1999 Tobias Jones immigrated to Italy, expecting to discover the pastoral bliss described by centuries of foreign visitors. Instead, he found a very different country: one besieged by unfathomable terrorism and deep-seated paranoia. The Dark Heart of Italy is Jones's account of his four-year voyage across the Italian peninsula.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eJones writes not just about Italy's art, climate, and cuisine but also about the much livelier and stranger sides of the Bel Paese: the language, soccer, Catholicism, cinema, television, and terrorism. Why, he wonders, does the parliament need a \"slaughter commission\"? Why do bombs still explode every time politics start getting serious? Why does everyone urge him to go home as soon as possible, saying that Italy is a \"brothel\"? Most of all, why does one man, Silvio Berlusconi--in the words of a famous song--appear to own everything from Padre Nostro (Our Father) to Cosa Nostra (the Mafia)?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe Italy that emerges from Jones's travels is a country scarred by civil wars and \"illustrious corpses\"; a country that is proudly visual rather than verbal, based on aesthetics rather than ethics; a country where crime is hardly ever followed by punishment; a place of incredible illusionism, where it is impossible to distinguish fantasy from reality and fact from fiction.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Farrar, Straus and Giroux","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47129773015280,"sku":"9781466804517","price":7.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781466804517_p0.jpg?v=1769890836","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781466804517","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}