Rugged Nation

Marco Armiero (Ph.D. in Economic History) is an environmental historian, currently working as a Senior Researcher at the National Research Council, Italy. He was among the founders of the environmental history field in Italy, co-authoring with Stefania Barca the first Italian textbook on the subject, Storia dell'Ambiente. Una Introduzione (2004). His main topics of study have been the history of environmental conflicts over property rights and access to common resources (forests and sea), the politics of nature and landscape in Italian-nation building and the environmental history of mass migrations. He co-edited with Marcus Hall the book Nature and History in Modern Italy (2010) and edited Views from the South. Environmental Stories from the Mediterranean World (19th-20th cent.) (2006). He has worked at the Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University; at the Environmental Science, Policy and Management Department, UC Berkeley; and at The Bill Lane Center for the Study of the American West, Stanford University. Since February 2010 he has been a Marie Curie Fellow at the L'Institut de Ciencia i Tecnologia Ambientals (ICTA), Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, working on a project about the political ecology of garbage in contemporary Naples, Italy.

[Armiero] deftly weaves together the varied threads of ecological and socioeconomic connections of mountain country and mountain peoples in the fabric of modern Italian history. The result is a rich and convincing pattern revealing the shapes of mountain images and mountain realities in culture, resistance movements, war, hydropower development, and landscape changes ... a new perspective on Italy. (Donald Hughes, Environmental History) Armiero proves the centrality of the European Alps and the Apennines in the narratives of the nation and its territory from the very beginning of the process of unification, and also in the conception and implementation of major public policies related to forestry, energy, tourism ... he combines, in a very fruitful way, an approach in terms of environmental history and the analysis of the symbolic aspects of the building of the Italian nation, materiality, and narratives. (Bernard Debarbieux, Mountain Research and Development)

• CONTENTS: Introduction Chapter 1. Wild Mountains Chapter 2. Rebel Mountains Chapter 3. Heroic Mountains Chapter 4. Dark Mountains Chapter 5. Epilogue