Read The Rough Guide to Italy

The Rough Guide to Italy

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Description:INTRODUCTION Of all European countries, Italy is perhaps the hardest to classify. It is a modern, industrialized nation, with companies like Fiat and Olivetti market- leaders in their field. It is the harbinger of style, its designers leading the way with each season's fashions. But it is also, to an equal degree, a Mediterranean country, with all that that implies. Agricultural land covers much of the country, a lot of it, especially in the South, still owned under almost feudal conditions. In towns and villages all over the country, life grinds to a halt in the middle of the day for a siesta, and is strongly family-oriented, with an emphasis on the traditions and rituals of the Catholic Church which, notwithstanding a growing scepticism among the country's youth, still dominates people's lives here to an immediately obvious degree. Above all Italy provokes reaction. Its people are volatile, rarely indifferent to anything, and on one and the same day you might encounter the kind of disdain dished out to tourist masses worldwide, and an hour later be treated to embarrassingly generous hospitality. If there is a single national characteristic, it's to embrace life to the in the hundreds of local festivals taking place across the country on any given day, to celebrate a saint or the local harvest; in the importance placed on good food; in the obsession with clothes and image; and above all in the daily domestic ritual of the collective evening stroll or passeggiata - a sociable affair celebrated by young and old alike in every town and village across the country. Italy only became a unified state in 1861 and, as a result, Italians often feel more loyalty to their region than the nation as a whole - something manifest in different cuisines, dialects, landscape, and often varying standards of living. There is also, of course, the country's enormous cultural Tuscany alone has more classified historical monuments than any country in the world; there are considerable remnants of the Roman Empire all over the country, notably of course in Rome itself; and every region retains its own relics of an artistic tradition generally acknowledged to be among the world's richest. Yet there's no reason to be intimidated by the art and architecture. If you want to lie on a beach, there are any number of places to do unlike, say, Spain, development has been kept relatively under control, and many resorts are still largely the preserve of Italian tourists. Other parts of the coast, especially in the south of the country, are almost entirely undiscovered. Beaches are for the most part sandy, and doubts about the cleanliness of the water have been confined to the northern part of the Adriatic coast and the Riviera. Mountains, too, run the country's length - from the Alps and Dolomites in the north right along the Apennines, which form the spine of the peninsula - and are an important reference-point for most Italians. Skiing and other winter sports are practised avidly, and in the five national parks, protected from the national passion for hunting, wildlife of all sorts thrives. Italy's regional the North and the South Italy breaks down into twenty regions, which in turn divide into different provinces. Some of these regional boundaries reflect long-standing historic borders, like Tuscany, Lombardy or the Veneto; others, like Friuli-Venezia Giulia or Molise, are more recent administrative divisions, often established in recognition of quite modern distinctions. But the sharpest division is between North and South. The North is one of the most advanced industrial societies in the world, a region that despite recent hiccups is one of extraordinary economic dynamism. Its people speak Italian with the cadences of France or Germany and its "capital", Milan, is a thoroughly European city. The South, derogatively known as il mezzogiorno, begins somewhere between Rome and Naples, and is by contrast one of the economically most depressed areas in Europe; and its history of absolutist regimes often seems to linger in the form of the spectre of organized crime and the remote hand of central government in Rome. The economic backwardness of the South is partly the result of the historical neglect to which it was subjected by various foreign occupiers. But it is also the result of the deliberate policy of politicians and corporate heads to industrialize the North while preserving the underdeveloped South as a convenient reservoir of labour. Italy's industrial power and dynamism, based in the North, has been built on the back of exploited southerners who emigrated to the northern industrial cities of Turin, Milan and Genoa in their millions during the Fifties and Sixties. Even now, Milan and Turin have very sizeable populations of meridionali - southerners - working in every sector of the economy. This north-south divide is something you'll come up against time and again, wherever you're travelling. To a northerner the mere mention of Na...We have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with The Rough Guide to Italy. To get started finding The Rough Guide to Italy, you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
Our library is the biggest of these that have literally hundreds of thousands of different products represented.

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ISBN: 1858284139

Description: INTRODUCTION Of all European countries, Italy is perhaps the hardest to classify. It is a modern, industrialized nation, with companies like Fiat and Olivetti market- leaders in their field. It is the harbinger of style, its designers leading the way with each season's fashions. But it is also, to an equal degree, a Mediterranean country, with all that that implies. Agricultural land covers much of the country, a lot of it, especially in the South, still owned under almost feudal conditions. In towns and villages all over the country, life grinds to a halt in the middle of the day for a siesta, and is strongly family-oriented, with an emphasis on the traditions and rituals of the Catholic Church which, notwithstanding a growing scepticism among the country's youth, still dominates people's lives here to an immediately obvious degree. Above all Italy provokes reaction. Its people are volatile, rarely indifferent to anything, and on one and the same day you might encounter the kind of disdain dished out to tourist masses worldwide, and an hour later be treated to embarrassingly generous hospitality. If there is a single national characteristic, it's to embrace life to the in the hundreds of local festivals taking place across the country on any given day, to celebrate a saint or the local harvest; in the importance placed on good food; in the obsession with clothes and image; and above all in the daily domestic ritual of the collective evening stroll or passeggiata - a sociable affair celebrated by young and old alike in every town and village across the country. Italy only became a unified state in 1861 and, as a result, Italians often feel more loyalty to their region than the nation as a whole - something manifest in different cuisines, dialects, landscape, and often varying standards of living. There is also, of course, the country's enormous cultural Tuscany alone has more classified historical monuments than any country in the world; there are considerable remnants of the Roman Empire all over the country, notably of course in Rome itself; and every region retains its own relics of an artistic tradition generally acknowledged to be among the world's richest. Yet there's no reason to be intimidated by the art and architecture. If you want to lie on a beach, there are any number of places to do unlike, say, Spain, development has been kept relatively under control, and many resorts are still largely the preserve of Italian tourists. Other parts of the coast, especially in the south of the country, are almost entirely undiscovered. Beaches are for the most part sandy, and doubts about the cleanliness of the water have been confined to the northern part of the Adriatic coast and the Riviera. Mountains, too, run the country's length - from the Alps and Dolomites in the north right along the Apennines, which form the spine of the peninsula - and are an important reference-point for most Italians. Skiing and other winter sports are practised avidly, and in the five national parks, protected from the national passion for hunting, wildlife of all sorts thrives. Italy's regional the North and the South Italy breaks down into twenty regions, which in turn divide into different provinces. Some of these regional boundaries reflect long-standing historic borders, like Tuscany, Lombardy or the Veneto; others, like Friuli-Venezia Giulia or Molise, are more recent administrative divisions, often established in recognition of quite modern distinctions. But the sharpest division is between North and South. The North is one of the most advanced industrial societies in the world, a region that despite recent hiccups is one of extraordinary economic dynamism. Its people speak Italian with the cadences of France or Germany and its "capital", Milan, is a thoroughly European city. The South, derogatively known as il mezzogiorno, begins somewhere between Rome and Naples, and is by contrast one of the economically most depressed areas in Europe; and its history of absolutist regimes often seems to linger in the form of the spectre of organized crime and the remote hand of central government in Rome. The economic backwardness of the South is partly the result of the historical neglect to which it was subjected by various foreign occupiers. But it is also the result of the deliberate policy of politicians and corporate heads to industrialize the North while preserving the underdeveloped South as a convenient reservoir of labour. Italy's industrial power and dynamism, based in the North, has been built on the back of exploited southerners who emigrated to the northern industrial cities of Turin, Milan and Genoa in their millions during the Fifties and Sixties. Even now, Milan and Turin have very sizeable populations of meridionali - southerners - working in every sector of the economy. This north-south divide is something you'll come up against time and again, wherever you're travelling. To a northerner the mere mention of Na...We have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with The Rough Guide to Italy. To get started finding The Rough Guide to Italy, you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
Our library is the biggest of these that have literally hundreds of thousands of different products represented.

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The Rough Guide to Italy

The Rough Guide to Italy

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