La Passione: How Italy Seduced the World by Dianne Hales; 2019. Hardcover.

Whether they built aqueducts, chiseled arches, conducted choirs, directed movies, raced cars, or designed fashion and furniture, Italians have done so with a full-hearted zest that transforms everything they touched. What didn't exist, they invented- the first universities, public libraries, and law and medical schools; the first modern histories, satires, and sonnets; the battery, barometer, radio, and thermometer-even the gift of music.

Dianne Hales attributes these landmark achievements to la passione italiana, a primal force that stems from an insatiable hunger to discover and create; to love and live with every fiber of one's being. This fierce drive, millennia in the making, blazes to life in the Sistine Chapel, surges through a Puccini aria, deepens a vintage Brunello, and rumbles in a gleaming Ferrari engine.

Hales takes readers along on her adventurous quest for the secrets of la passione. She swims in the playgrounds of mythic gods, shadows artisanal makers of chocolate and cheese, joins in Sicily's Holy Week traditions, celebrates a neighborhood Carnevale in Venice, and explores pagan temples, vineyards, silk mills, movie sets, crafts studios, and fashion salons.