The Best Books Set in Italy

The great Italian novel. Set in Sicily during the Risorgimento, it follows an aging prince watching his world — aristocratic, unhurried, magnificent — dissolve around him. Lampedusa wrote it once, published it posthumously, and it's never been out of print. The prose moves like memory: slow, exact, devastating. If you read one Italian novel in your life, make it this one.

The first of the Neapolitan Novels and one of the most acclaimed works of fiction of the last twenty years. Two girls grow up together in a poor Naples neighbourhood in the 1950s. Ferrante writes about female friendship, ambition, and the particular violence of poverty with an intensity that feels almost physical. The city itself — loud, beautiful, dangerous — is as present as any character.

Lucy Honeychurch goes to Florence with her cousin and comes back changed — or tries not to be. Forster's comedy of manners is sharp and funny and genuinely romantic, and his Florence — the Piazza della Signoria, the churches, the pension overlooking the hills — is rendered with the precision of someone who loved a place and paid attention. A short novel that earns every page.

Mayes buys a ruined farmhouse in Cortona on impulse and spends the next decade restoring it, cooking in it, and writing about both with infectious pleasure. This is the book that launched a thousand Italian property dreams. It works because Mayes is genuinely curious — about the history, the food, the people, the land — and that curiosity makes every chapter feel like an invitation.

Parks has lived in Italy for decades and writes about it with the particular clarity of someone who loves a place but refuses to romanticise it. This book follows the Italian railway system as a lens for understanding Italian culture — bureaucracy, class, regionalism, beauty. It's funny and precise and the best antidote to fantasy-Italy that exists. Read it before you go, not after.

A young Italian innkeeper on a remote Ligurian cliff meets a dying American actress in 1962, and the novel spirals outward from that moment across five decades and two continents. Walter writes with enormous warmth and wit — this is a book about movies, failure, love, and the stories we tell ourselves about our lives. The Italian sections are achingly beautiful. One of the great American novels of the last twenty years.

A dying English-language newspaper in Rome serves as the setting for eleven linked stories, each following a different staff member through their particular unravelling. Rachman is a former journalist and it shows — the novel is witty, precise, and quietly devastating about the way institutions fail and people persist. Rome itself hums underneath every scene: beautiful, indifferent, eternal.

True crime set against the backdrop of one of the world's most beautiful cities. Preston, an American thriller writer living in Florence, teams up with Italian journalist Spezi to investigate Italy's most notorious serial killer case — and finds himself drawn into a story stranger and more dangerous than any fiction. The Florentine countryside has never felt more sinister.