This Beautiful Country

How Italy's Nature Shaped Its Culture and Civilisation
Discover Italy's unique ecological past and how it has shaped its present-and its future, with this riveting look at the incredibly diverse natural history and our need to preserve it.
Italy is renowned for its antiquity, classical literature, philosophy, and modern-day culture, cuisine and fashion, but what has gone largely overlooked and undocumented, even by its people is its unique biodiversity. Italy has over 58,000 different species of wildlife, of which 4,777 are endemic, the highest in Europe. Italy provides a home for a third of all European flora and fauna, with a vast range of fruit and vegetable varieties: more grape varieties than France, more wheat than the US and more olives than Spain. Edward Cutler, an art historian by trade, began to explore this history when, four years ago on his small Tuscan farm, he found a salamander that turned out to be endemic to that specific location. In understanding how Italy came together as a country, one of the youngest and still geologically active landscapes in the world, Ed realised that this natural history has also had an incredibly important influence on its human history, especially its food culture and low-impact agriculture.

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