Books Set In

Best Books Set in Italy — 12 Novels From Rome to Sicily

Italy has a literary tradition that predates almost every other country's, and it has attracted some of the most important fiction of the twentieth century from writers working in and beyond Italian. These twelve books span contemporary Naples, 1950s Rome, medieval monasteries, and Venetian glass-making — from Ferrante's working-class Naples to Highsmith's sun-drenched thriller Italy to Lampedusa's dying Sicily. The country is not the backdrop but the subject.

From Naples to Sicily

Literary, thriller & classic

Spanning 900 years

Italy in Fiction: What to Expect

The north and south are different literary territories — Ferrante's Naples is a different Italy from Highsmith's Rome or Lampedusa's Sicily.
Historical fiction set in Italy often works best in the medieval period (Eco, Cornwell) or the post-war decades (Moravia, Calvino).
Contemporary Italian fiction tends to be translated — look for Ferrante (pseudonymous), Amara Lakhous, and Elena Ferrante's Naples quartet.
The expatriate tradition is rich: Highsmith, Forster, and many others used Italy as a space for transformation and transgression unavailable at home.
If you want the food alongside the fiction: Frances Mayes (Under the Tuscan Sun) and Marlena de Blasi are the reliable choices.

Literary — Italian Life on the Page

Pick #1

My Brilliant Friend

Elena Ferrante • 2011 • Literary Fiction

Naples, 1950s–1960s Female friendship across a lifetime Naples Quartet, Book 1

Elena and Lila grow up in a poor Naples neighbourhood in the 1950s. Their friendship — competitive, intimate, co-dependent, transforming — is the subject of four novels that are arguably the most important Italian literary achievement of the century. Ferrante (a pseudonym) writes Naples with the same density and particularity that Joyce gave Dublin: a city that is also a psychology, a class system, a body. The first novel ends with Lila's wedding; the fourth spans sixty years and ends with a disappearance. The quartet is the essential Italian literary reading project. Begin here and plan to read all four consecutively — the architecture requires it.

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Pick #2

Under the Tuscan Sun

Frances Mayes • 1996 • Memoir

Cortona, Tuscany Restoring a villa The original Italian escapism memoir

Frances Mayes buys a derelict farmhouse in Tuscany and restores it over several summers. The memoir is structured around the seasons, the renovation, the food, and the slow acquisition of Italian life — markets, festivals, neighbours, the particular light of the Tuscan hills. Mayes writes with the sensory richness that makes this the defining Italy memoir: you can smell the rosemary and taste the wine. The film is pleasant but extracts the romance at the expense of the detail, which is where the book's pleasure lives. For readers planning a trip to Tuscany or for anyone who has ever wanted a slower, more anchored life. The book that made Cortona a tourist destination and has not been forgiven for it by the locals.

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Pick #3

The Glassblower of Murano

Marina Fiorato • 2008 • Historical Fiction

Venice and Murano Dual timeline Seventeenth century glass-making secrets

Leonora, a contemporary Londoner, travels to Murano to restore her family's glassblowing heritage. Her ancestor Corradino worked for the great glassblowers of the Republic of Venice in the seventeenth century — a Republic that imprisoned its master craftsmen to protect the secrets of Murano glass. Fiorato alternates between Leonora's present and Corradino's past, and the island of Murano — the light on the water, the hot furnaces, the extraordinary craft — is rendered with genuine care. A lighter read than Ferrante but deeply embedded in a specific Italian place. For readers who want their Italian setting with a satisfying historical mystery.

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Pick #4

When in Rome

Nicky Pellegrino • 2008 • Contemporary Fiction

Rome, food and love Warm and accessible For armchair travellers

Addolorata arrives in Rome from New Zealand to work in a famous Roman restaurant. Pellegrino writes Italian food and Roman life with the warmth of someone who has spent years in Italy — the markets, the pasta, the particular drama of a Roman kitchen, the way the city operates on its own time. The novel is light, warm, and suffused with the sensory pleasure of Roman life: the food descriptions alone justify reading it. For readers who want their Italian setting straightforward and their romance satisfying rather than challenging. Pellegrino's other Italian novels (The Gypsy Wedding, Recipe for Life) operate in the same register and are equally accessible.

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Thriller — Italy as Menace and Mystery

Pick #5

The Talented Mr. Ripley

Patricia Highsmith • 1955 • Psychological Thriller

Rome, Naples, Venice Identity and murder Italy as the space for reinvention

Tom Ripley goes to Italy to retrieve a wealthy man's son. He kills him and assumes his identity. Highsmith uses Italy as the expatriate space — the country where rules are suspended, where identity is malleable, where the American abroad can become someone entirely different and the existing social structures won't catch it. The Italy of Ripley's Italy is the Italy of dolce vita Rome, of baking southern towns, of the specific privilege of having money in a beautiful country — and Highsmith writes it with extraordinary precision. The psychology of the book is inseparable from its setting: Tom becomes Dickie in Italy because Italy is where becoming someone else seems possible. The most essential thriller on this list and one of the great psychological novels of the century.

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Pick #6

The Name of the Rose

Umberto Eco • 1980 • Historical Thriller / Literary Fiction

14th century Italian monastery Monks dying mysteriously Medieval detective fiction

William of Baskerville, a Franciscan friar, and his novice Adso arrive at a northern Italian abbey where monks are dying in mysterious circumstances linked to the great library. Eco's novel is simultaneously a medieval detective story, a treatise on semiotics, a study of religious fanaticism, and one of the most architecturally complex thrillers ever written. The monastery is its own Italy — a closed world with its own rules and hierarchies — and Eco renders it with scholarly density and genuine suspense. The first hundred pages are demanding (medieval theology); the reward for persistence is one of the most intellectually satisfying thriller experiences in the canon. The Sean Connery film is good but omits the labyrinthine intellectual content that makes the novel exceptional.

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Pick #7

The Savage Shore

David Hewson • 2019 • Thriller

Calabria and the 'Ndrangheta Italy's most secretive organised crime Nic Costa series

An undercover operative embedded in the 'Ndrangheta — Calabria's organised crime network, more secretive and more financially powerful than the Sicilian Mafia — faces a crisis of loyalty. Hewson's Italy is not the postcard Italy of Tuscany or Venice but the south: violent, beautiful, ancient, and governed by codes that have persisted for centuries. The Nic Costa series (set in Rome) is Hewson's primary Italian canvas; The Savage Shore is a standalone that ventures into the largely unlit territory of the 'Ndrangheta. For thriller readers who want their Italy to be the other Italy — the one that doesn't make the tourist brochures.

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Pick #8

The Italians

John Hooper • 2015 • Narrative Nonfiction

Italy explained by a long-term correspondent Politics, family, religion, and food Essential reading before visiting

Hooper spent decades as The Economist and Guardian's Italy correspondent and has written the definitive English-language guide to how Italian society actually works — the role of the family, the relationship with the state, the Catholic Church's continuing influence, the political system's chaos, the fashion industry, the food culture. Unlike Beppe Severgnini's more comic take on the same subject, Hooper writes analytically and with genuine depth. The result is not a book about Italy's surfaces but its structures. Listed here because reading it transforms every visit and every Italian novel — after The Italians, Ferrante and Eco read differently. Essential for anyone planning an extended stay or with an ongoing relationship with the country.

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Classic — Italy's Literary Foundation

Pick #9

The Leopard

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa • 1958 • Literary Fiction / Classic

Sicily, 1860 Aristocracy facing its end Greatest Italian novel of the century

Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina — the Leopard — watches his world change as Garibaldi's revolution transforms Sicily. The novel is about the end of the Sicilian aristocracy, written by a man who was himself the last of his line. Lampedusa's prose is magnificent in Archibald Colquhoun's translation: rich, ironic, melancholy, and suffused with the heat and light and dust of the Sicilian summer. The line "Everything must change so that everything can remain the same" — one of the great formulations of conservative despair — comes from this novel. The essential Italian literary classic. Visconti's 1963 film adaptation with Burt Lancaster is one of the greatest films ever made; the novel is better.

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Pick #10

A Room with a View

E.M. Forster • 1908 • Literary Fiction / Classic

Florence, 1907 Italy as liberation from English propriety Comedy of manners

Lucy Honeychurch travels to Florence with her chaperone Charlotte and encounters George Emerson, who has a room with a view and the freedom from class constraint that she doesn't. Forster uses Florence as England's opposite — a country where feeling is permitted, where the body exists, where the Edwardian social codes lose their grip in the Italian sun. The novel is funny, warm, and acutely observed; Lucy's gradual liberation from the propriety that is strangling her is one of the most satisfying character arcs in English fiction. The Merchant-Ivory adaptation is excellent. For readers who want their Italy to be the transformative space it has been in the Anglo-American literary imagination for two centuries.

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Pick #11

Death in Venice

Thomas Mann • 1912 • Literary Fiction / Classic

Venice at its most oppressive Obsession and decline Mann at his most concentrated

Gustav von Aschenbach, a distinguished German writer, arrives in Venice for rest and finds obsession. The novella — under 100 pages — uses Venice as a city of beauty and decay simultaneously: the canals, the heat, the cholera epidemic being concealed from tourists, the beautiful Polish boy who becomes the object of Aschenbach's consuming attention. Mann writes the descent with extraordinary control; the novella is compact but dense with classical allusion and psychological precision. Venice here is not the romantic Venice of gondolas and prosecco but the Venice of water and rot and beautiful, inevitable death. Visconti's film adaptation is one of the great works of cinema; the novella is the essential starting point. For readers who want their Italy challenging rather than consoling.

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Pick #12

Eat Pray Love

Elizabeth Gilbert • 2006 • Memoir

Rome (the Eat section) Post-divorce reinvention The ultimate armchair travel memoir

Gilbert spends four months in Italy eating pasta and learning Italian after her divorce, then travels to India and Bali. The Rome section — the "Eat" third of the memoir — is the most useful for our purposes and the most genuinely pleasurable: Gilbert's account of the specific joy of Roman food, of doing nothing beautiful very seriously, of choosing pleasure over productivity as an act of self-recovery. The memoir has been widely mocked and widely loved in equal measure; the Italian section deserves its reputation as one of the most sensory and joyful accounts of living in Rome. For readers who want Italy as personal reinvention — the tradition that runs from Forster through Mayes through Gilbert. Also: the pizza in Naples is as she describes.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What's the best Italian novel to start with if I've never read Italian literature?

My Brilliant Friend (Ferrante) is the most accessible entry point for contemporary Italian fiction and the most compelling — it reads at pace and doesn't require historical context. If you want a shorter introduction: The Leopard is a novella-length masterpiece that can be read in an afternoon. If you want something even more accessible: Under the Tuscan Sun or Eat Pray Love are the warmest entry points, though they're memoirs rather than fiction. Start with Ferrante if you want the experience of Italian life from the inside; start with Highsmith if you want Italy as a thriller backdrop.

Which of these is best to read before visiting Italy?

For Rome: Eat Pray Love (practical and sensory), or Highsmith's Ripley novels for the darker under-city. For Tuscany: Under the Tuscan Sun. For Florence: A Room with a View. For Venice: Death in Venice (dark) or The Glassblower of Murano (warmer). For Naples: My Brilliant Friend — though be warned it will make you see Naples very differently from the tourist perspective. For Sicily: The Leopard. For Italy generally before any trip: John Hooper's The Italians is the most useful preparation.

Are there good contemporary Italian crime novels?

Yes. Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano series (set in Sicily, 27 novels) is the most widely read — warm, funny, food-obsessed, and very Sicilian. Donna Leon's Commissario Brunetti series (set in Venice) is excellent and more literary than Camilleri. Gianrico Carofiglio's Guido Guerrieri series (set in Bari, southern Italy) is the most psychologically sophisticated of the contemporary Italian crime series. Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen series (Rome and various Italian cities) is now concluded but is excellent for readers who want the political texture of post-war Italy alongside the crime.

What about the Amalfi Coast and Capri?

The Amalfi Coast and Capri are better served by memoir than fiction. Shirley Hazzard's The Bay of Noon is set in Naples and the south. Norman Douglas's South Wind is set on a fictional island modelled on Capri. For the contemporary Amalfi setting, Robert Harris's Pompeii is set nearby and is excellent historical fiction about the eruption of Vesuvius. Highsmith's Ripley Under Ground and later Ripley novels continue the series across Italy including the south. For Capri specifically: Axel Munthe's The Story of San Michele is the essential memoir of island life at the turn of the century.