Recommended reading on Italian history

You can see comments by people who read Phil's suggested book here:
The Science of Cooking

There are many to choose from:
The Blue Guide series provides a history of the region that is now Italy. There is a Blue Guide book for each major city/region; these books are also guidebooks.

Or you could look at Blue Guide Concise Italy and see if it has enough for you in the one volume.

Or check out A Traveller's History of Italy (yes, that's how the book spells Traveler's)

Mary Sue, I love reading history of Italy but haven't found one book that covers it adequately (although I haven't read the ones suggested here yet). If you want something seriously historical, you may want to narrow it by historical periods or by geography. John Julian Norwich wrote a remarkable history of Venice, Michael Grant covers the ancient period in a very accessible way.

Your local library might be the best place to start.

The other thing you could do is: search on Amazon.com for books on Italian history, then go to each book and use Amazon's "look inside" feature to check out the table of contents and skim the book, until you find the one that best fits your needs.

Start by reading on Wikipedia. It usually gives a good overview of most countries and cities of the world.

There is a company called the great courses. It's college courses on DVDs or video streaming. I did the history of Italy by Bartlett. I am now watching one on Michelangelo. The Great Courses have quite a few lecture series that apply to Italy. We also watched one on cathedrals. You can also see Rick Steve videos and free Audioguides in advance. The Sr. Wendy Beckett book "The story of painting" has a great section on Italian Art. It's a large part of the book. We recently purchased a fat guidebook of Rome Churches and another on Assisi. Just start looking online and you will find much written on Italy. I like the DVDs. You can relax after work and pop one in. Roman History, crusades, the Vatican, etc. - much has been written about these subjects.

Not history, but a good read . . . I reread Irving Stone's The Agony and the Ecstasy (a biographical novel of Michelangelo) and it gave me a good background in Renaissance art, the history of that era, how the great works of art were done - sculpture, painting, frescoes, how the great artists influenced each other. . .

Not so much a history as a sociological study of people through interviews, ala, Studs Terkel, try Sicilian Lives by Danilo Dolci.

Although I have not read The Science of Cooking and the Art of Fine Dining by Pellegrino Artusi I did attend the annual food festival in honor of Pelegrino Artusi in Forlinpopoli in June of 2014, yum. http://www.travelmole.com/news_feature.php?news_id=2007203

Michael, thanks for the directions to the review. Yup, a cook book; but a dang interesting cook book. I might buy it for the read, but I don't think it would be the most productive source for Italian History unless you were working on some sort of focused doctorate on Italian history.

Galileo's daughter by Dava Sobel, certainly not exhaustive, but will cement some era's and locations for you

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone. Quirite, La Storia d'Italia looks perfect, but it does not appear to have been translated - and English translations of Italian history books written by Italians seem to be in short supply. I will be using these books as a jumping off point for further reading. So far, it looks like my best bets are going to be A Concise History of Italy, by Christopher Duggan, and A Traveler's History of Italy, by Valerio Lintner.