Commissioned by Fayard editions of Paris and published for the first time in 1968, it is a highly successful work, known by many generations. It intends to recount "The story of how, through a long and contrasting way, Italy contributed to form and develop the modern European civilization. It is a piece of European history, and the correct starting point can be only around the year 1000, that historically is the first of those qualitative leaps in the economic and social development of European society that will bring it during the modern age to assume a position of dominance on the rest of the world. We must realize that the Italian one is a land where everything from the form of the fields to the quality and preparation of food, from the ways of culture to the tracing of the streets, from the cerebral sophistication of the savants to the learned ignorance of the simples, concurs to give to its habitants the sense of a continuity of work and fatigue and insinuate in them, together with the feeling of time, that of resignation "(from the Introduction by Giuliano Procacci).