Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

For over a century, Italy has had a love affair with the cigarette. Perhaps no consumer item better symbolizes the economic, political, social, and cultural dimensions of contemporary Italian history. Starting around 1900, the new and popular cigarette spread down the social hierarchy and eventually, during the 1960s, across the gender divide. For much of the century, cigarette consumption was an index of economic well-being and of modernism. Only at the end of the century did its meaning change as Italy achieved economic parity with other Western powers and entered into the antismoking era.

Drawing on film, literature, and the popular press, Carl Ipsen offers a view of the "cigarette century" in Italy, from the 1870s to the ban on public smoking in 2005. He traces important links between smoking and imperialism, world wars, Fascism, and the protest movements of the 1970s. In considering this grand survey of the cigarette, Fumo tells a much larger story about the socio-economic history of a society known for its casual attitude toward risk and a penchant for la dolce vita.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

The history of smoking in Italy, as historian Ipsen (Indiana Univ.) shows in this remarkable book, is uniquely Italian. In the late 19th century, when mass manufactured cigarettes were first introduced, Italy was a relatively poor and decidedly patriarchal country. It was men who smoked, particularly affluent men, while women almost never did (save for those who braved custom). Smoking increased during WW I, but not to the degree it did in England or the US. Even in the Fascist era, the prevalence of smoking remained relatively low. It was only at the end of WW II that smoking rates began to increase, perhaps because all things American had come into fashion. By the seventies, with the coming of the economic miracle, those rates soared, and in the last decades of the century Italians were far more reluctant than the Americans or the English to face up to the risks that came with smoking (which, as the author notes, may be explained by a general Italian propensity to ignore risk). The government, which benefitted from the tobacco monopoly, took decades to take action of any sort. This is an exemplary interdisciplinary study. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. --Stephen Bailey, Knox College

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Carl Ipsen is Professor of History at Indiana University. He is the author of Italy in the Age of Pinocchio: Children and Danger in the Liberal Era (2006) and Dictating Demography: The Problem of Population in Fascist Italy (1996).