The fieldwork behind this book is somewhat unconventional, at least for an academic publication. In the early 2000s, the author was employed by a tobacco company, which was engaged in a judicial case involving an Italian who had migrated to America and had died of lung cancer. The immediate purpose was to conduct research on the ‘common knowledge of the health risks of cigarette smoking’ in twentieth-century Italy, in order to support or reject the claim of misinformation by the prosecution (p. 217). Soon, however, the author’s research work started to take a broader scope: the presence of cigarettes in Italy’s social, economic, cultural, and even political history appeared to be ubiquitous, requiring further investigation and a wider approach. The result is this book, presenting itself as the history of ‘Italy’s love affair with the cigarette’.

Was it truly a love affair? The answer is definitely yes – inasmuch, however, as the whole of the West seems to have suffered from the same passion, before turning (as perhaps always happens, when it comes to forbidden and self-destroying liaisons) to demonisation and fear. This is the first of the book’s main theses: through its long-lasting relationship with smoked tobacco – from the decadent pleasures of the fin de siècle to the tobacco industry during the Fascist and colonial age, from the increase in consumption in the post-war years to the rise of anti-smoking campaigns from the 1980s onwards – the Italian case does not present specific elements of difference compared to other countries. Certainly, cigarette commercials of the 1950s may have been less flamboyant than the American ones, and the anti-smoking zeal, in recent years, less virulent than the British: still, and this is the other book’s overarching thesis, patterns in tobacco usage throughout the twentieth century are relatively homogenous for all industrialised countries. After it became a popular habit in the trenches of the First World War, smoking witnessed its golden age in the 1950s, ‘thanks’ to its massive presence in the media, the more or less willing underestimation of smoking-related risks on the part of tobacco companies, massive campaigns of advertising, and a broad perception of smoking as a ‘glamorous’ and ‘trendy’ vice. Women were particularly affected by these media strategies, by which smoking was presented as a vector of emancipation. Italy, in this respect, is quite a telling case, in that smoking – as is extensively explored in chapter 7 – deeply pervaded the feminist imaginary throughout the 1970s, leading to an increase in the number of female smokers, at a time when rates tended to decrease among the country’s male population. At the same time, information about smoking-related risks found its place in the Italian press, from the 1960s onwards, in the same way as in other countries, leading to the progressive development of a collective sensibility on the matter. This process paved the way to a progressive reduction of smoking-friendly spaces over the years, until the final ban from public places of 2005: the so called ‘legge Sirchia’, now arguably – as the author puts it – ‘the country’s most beloved law’ (p. 14).

Book chapters – each named after an Italian cigarette brand – follow an overall chronological pattern, from the early twentieth century to the early twenty-first, touching all the most salient moments of Italy’s contemporary history: the two World Wars, reconstruction and the economic boom, the social and political turmoil of the 1970s, the hedonism of the 1980s, Tangentopoli, and the age of Berlusconi. Economic, social, and political analysis is always supported by attention to the cultural sphere, covering the presence of smoking in literature (starting, of course, with the famous chapter on cigarettes that opens Svevo’s La coscienza di Zeno), cinema, the visual arts, and, more broadly, popular culture. The book is also enriched by a substantial iconographic apparatus, made up of sources that are largely unavailable elsewhere. The author pays specific attention to the way smoking has often been perceived or sold as a gendered habit, either as a vice that is peculiar to men – as specifically in the early twentieth century – or as a way, for women, of emancipating themselves, by appearing glamorous and seductive or, conversely, unconventional and ‘liberated’.

Unfortunately, scarce or no attention is paid to the biopolitical sphere, a viewpoint that could have been extremely promising for understanding the place smoking – and, later, anti-smoking policies – have held in contemporary society, and which could have opened interesting perspectives in terms of identifying the specificities of the Italian case. Indeed, the book systematically compares Italy to Anglo-Saxon countries, the USA in particular, which is an interesting reading key, but surely not the only one: in this context, the substantial absence of France as a term of reference is somewhat regrettable, given the peculiar place smoking holds in the French imaginary, the many points of connection between French and Italian culture, and the heavy influence that the French understanding of individual liberty and the role of the state has had on Italy’s political culture. The Anglo-Saxon and the French political traditions show remarkable differences in terms of understanding the relationship between the individual and the state, the limits of the citizen’s freedom, the constitutional right to health, and the place of the individual within the community, all themes that possess obvious reverberations when it comes to smoking as a political matter. Taking into consideration the French domain and its influence on Italian culture could have perhaps helped in better problematising the troubled ‘love affair’ between Italy and the cigarette, as well as in isolating its elements of exceptionality.

A rich study on the role smoking has played in Italy’s society and culture, Fumo will naturally appeal to a wide range of readers, both specialist and non-specialist, with an interest in Italian history. They will find in it a fascinating opportunity to see the Italian twentieth century from an unusual angle, between the private and the public sphere.