There are books that do not aim to “say everything,” but to restore order. Brevi lezioni di storia italiana (e non solo) belongs to this rare category: a work that chooses subtraction as method and clarity as its form, entrusting two authoritative voices — Ernesto Galli della Loggia and Paolo Mieli — with the task of bringing more than two centuries of history back into a readable line, without reductionism and without emphasis.

The method is declared from the outset: to take a long century of fractures — wars, totalitarianisms, fragile democracies, economic crises, rebirths — and distill the connections, the causes, the deep repetitions. The authors work in a complementary way: Mieli with the narrative intelligence of the civic-minded intellectual, Galli della Loggia with the long gaze of the historian who interrogates foundations. The result is a work that does not simplify, but makes readable. And today, that is no small thing.

The book moves through the Risorgimento, the liberal age, the Great War, the tragedies of the totalitarianisms, the Cold War, the transformations of the Republic, and globalization. But it is not a sequence of school-like chapters: it is rather an atlas of turning points, an essential geography that restores Italian unification in its precarious balance, the fragility of the liberal state, the brutality of twentieth-century ideologies, and the newer — softer, but no less pervasive — forms of power in the contemporary world.

One of the book’s finest merits lies precisely in its capacity to illuminate unexpected perspectives.
In recounting the liberal age, for instance, the authors evoke — in a single clean, controlled page — the sense of an incomplete modernization without indulging in clichés.
Likewise, in discussing the relationship between totalitarian regimes and the masses, they include a remarkably effective passage showing how propaganda works not so much as “imposition,” but as an offer of belonging: a detail that, by itself, is worth more than many textbooks.

Another strong point is the balance between Italy and Europe: in the narrative of the Great War, in the analysis of the fragility of democracies between the two wars, in the reading of the Italian Republic and its tensions in the 1970s and 1980s — everything appears situated within a wider, non-provincial, genuinely historical context.

The book does not pretend to be definitive; rather, it seeks to be useful.
And it succeeds.
Because it gives us a history of Italy that avoids both nostalgia and moralistic condemnation, offering instead a thread, a compass, a minimal grammar through which to navigate the past and — inevitably — the present.

It is a volume one can read in a few hours, yet one that lingers for the clarity of its tone and the seriousness of its gaze.
A brief synthesis, yes — but far from “minimal.”

Solferino accompanies the operation with a clear and careful edition, designed for a wide audience and consistent with the imprint’s now recognizable line of rigorous, accessible historical writing. It would not be surprising to see excerpts circulate for a long time in schools and introductory university courses: this is a book that works well as a bridge, not as a conclusion.