Unknown to most foreigners, as they follow each other round Florence and Siena, Rome and Venice, the Italy they see today is the result of a second renaissance. And its seat was a city they need to discover, in all its enigmatic allure, if they are truly to understand modern Italian society and culture. That city is Turin.
Risorgimento, resistance, reconstruction: none of these decisive phases in Italy’s modern evolution would have been the same without this unsung city. In exploring the contribution of Turin, this book entwines some of the nation’s most celebrated modern names with less familiar locals who illuminate the gaps in between: from the forgotten poet who bears exquisite witness to the crepuscular mood of Turin at the turn of the last century; to the Torino footballer who had fought with the partisans before becoming a star of neorealist cinema.
But this is anything but a simple history of the city. Its purview is confined to barely 100 years, between Turin’s brief accession as first capital of Italy and its emergence, after two calamitous decades of dictatorship and bloodshed, as the engine room of a great postwar revival – both economic and literary. It duly opens with a formal Risorgimento, and ends with a real one.

Christopher McGrath’s only previous book, a social history of the Turf, Mr Darley’s Arabian (John Murray, 2016), was shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year. McGrath is an award-winning journalist who has spent a lifetime visiting and travelling in Italy, and in Piedmont in particular.