“Anyone interested in Italy will be fascinated and enchanted by The Idea of Italy: Photography and the British Imagination, 1840–1900. Edited by Maria Antonella Pelizzari and Scott Wilcox, it features sixteen essays exploring a wide range of topics—from tourist images of ‘a ghostly landscape of well-lit but unpopulated historical sites’ to picturesque peasants and outlaws, costumed models and Risorgimento heroes.”—James Hall, Times Literary Supplement, “Books of 2022”“In E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View, the young heroine Lucy Honeychurch spends ‘nearly seven lire’ at Alinari’s, the shop of a Florence-based firm founded in 1852 and specialising in the photographic reproduction of Italy’s great works of art. . . . The images on these handsomely illustrated pages, together with 16 essays, reveal many of the same attitudes that Forster so brilliantly exposes.”—Sophie Barling, World of Interiors