Why is Italy still riven with internal conflict? And why does one man - Silvio Berlusconi - appear to own everything from Padre Nostro to Cosa Nostra? Tobias Jones set out to answer these and many other questions during his three-year voyage across the Italian peninsular. What emerges is not a book about the tourist concerns of climate, cuisine and art, but one about the much livelier and stranger sides of the Bel Paese: the language, football, Catholicism, cinema, television and terrorism - and the grip exercised by Berlusconi through his vast media empire and Presidency of the Republic.