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Out of Italy
- Two Centuries of World Domination and Demise
- Narrated by: Paul Brion
- Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins
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Out of Italy
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Summary
From the author of Memory and the Mediterranean, a comprehensive history of the Italian city states from 1450 to 1650.
In the fifteenth century, even before the city states of the Apennine Peninsula began to coalesce into what would become, several centuries later, a nation, "Italy" exerted enormous influence over all of Europe and throughout the Mediterranean. Its cultural, economic, and political dominance is utterly astonishing and unique in world history. Viewing the Italy (the many Italies?) of that time through the lens of today allows us to gather a fragmented, multi-faceted, and seemingly contradictory history into a single unifying narrative that speaks to our current reality as much as it does to a specific historical period.
This is what the acclaimed French historian, Fernand Braudel, achieves here. He brings to life the two extraordinary centuries that span the Renaissance, Mannerism, and the Baroque and analyzes the complex interaction between art, science, politics, and commerce during Italy's extraordinary cultural flowering.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance2 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- JCM
- 13-10-24
Why is this the only Braudel on Audible?
This lesser-known work is a neat indicator of both Braudel's strengths and his weaknesses: The massively macro perspective (going far beyond Italy's borders and the two hundred year timeframe he's set himself to lay out his explanations of why the Renaissance was so dominated by Italy, and why it subsequently declined) down to ridiculous detail about seemingly obscure and unimportant issues, which somehow demonstrate the macro shifts.
It's not as superficial as his History of Civilisations, nor as granular as his Mediterranean, and has far less of a clarity of hypothesis than any of his books that I'm aware of.
Why was it Italy that saw so many great advances in art and science and commerce and more over such a short period? TBH, after all this I'm still not sure - and I'm not even convinced that the question is the right one, due to insufficient comparative analysis of other countries and cultires.
Braudel talks much of "destiny" at the start - a profoundly unhistorical concept, at least for most of the last century - and concludes with something along much the same lines. It's frankly unsatisfying.
But then, I found his train of thought with this one much harder to follow than usual - almost as if this is little more than preparatory notes as he tried to order his thoughts for what turned out to be Civilisation and Capitalism, his massive three-volume global study which has been gathering dust on my shelf for a few years now. Was that the origin of this one? If so, it becomes more interesting than it is as a standalone work.
I'd love Civilisation and Capitalism as an audiobook, ditto The Mediterranean - though both would be hard to follow without the maps and charts.
This should have been an easier audio production - but sadly the narrator, despite having a smooth voice, is pretty awful. Non-English words and names consistently mispronounced, even well-known ones, and done in a flat reading that misses points of emphasis. An AI bot would have done better - even a previous generation one.
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