The English have something of a proprietorial attitude to Italy and specifically to Etruria, the area that includes Tuscany, Umbria, Emilia-Romagna and The Marches. It's the legacy of Keats, Byron and Shelley, and in their wake the Grand Tour for the cultural enlightenment of the aristocracy.
This view of Italy has given us the word "Chiantishire"' and a caricature of Italians that portrays them as naughty children who play in the sunshine heedless of the more consequential human pursuits of developing sound laws, orderly politics and an incorruptible bureaucracy.
Perhaps there's something in the Etrurian character, its orderliness, or its eye for beauty, that the English find so appealing. Beyond its boundaries, it is easy to find yourself in a land as strange and as foreign as the outer reaches of Turkey.
Thus, Etruria is a haven of Northern European sensibilities in an otherwise very different culture, where rules and laws are consistently broken and civic order hangs by a gossamer thread.
Which is why Naples holds so many terrors for the English tourist.
A truth is a truth no matter whence it comes; an accurate observation remains valid no matter who framed it, but I was nonetheless struck by the preponderance of non-Italian sources that form the content of this book. It begins with cities: out of 18 selections on Rome, three are from Italians - as long as you count Ovid as one. Twelve selections on Naples include one short Neapolitan saying, while Venice finds not one Italian voice.
De Terβn hasn't confined her choices to her immediate heartland of Umbria, where she lived for 17 years. The peninsula is covered (by quotation) from the Northern reaches to Sicily. She quotes Goethe, "to have seen Italy without having seen Sicily is not to have seen Italy at all, for Sicily is the clue to everything". I'll take it upon myself to elaborate that: the essence of Italy is to be found where the fewest foreign influences have been adopted.
She has divided this anthology into four sections, named by the four classical elements of fire, earth, air and water - a construct that places the coast and Venice in "Water"; warfare and Vesuvius in "Fire"; music and sky in "Air" and Sicily in "Earth". It makes for a book that you dip into rather than read through.
Here you can find the thoughts and observations of many visitors to Italy, and a few from Italians such as Luigi Barzini, Ignazio Silone and Primo Levi.
There are notable omissions: no Luigi Pirandello, no Alberto Moravia, and nothing from Italy's best-known commentator, Indro Montanelli. But as any mirror to a nation should, this anthology reflects Italy's beauty as well as its corrupt underbelly.
However astute the chosen observations, I'm still left with the feeling that this is Italy through a visitor's eyes, and many of these visitors are far from contemporary - Sterne, Walpole, Addison and Dickens all have their say.
These great writers give much to intrigue and reflect upon, but on the whole, these are observations of form, not of content. There are descriptions of places, of people, events and behaviours, but little to explain the underlying reasons as to why the Italians are as they are. If nothing else, this anthology will give any Italian reading it a sense of how Italy is viewed by the English.
Paolo Tullio is the author of North of Naples, South of Rome