Solo female traveler on the Rialto Bridge in Venice, Italy

When planning a trip, my favorite way to set and get into the civilization is past reading. It's similar a vacation before the holiday! So if y'all're looking for the best books about Italy to read before you visit, y'all're in luck – hither are my top 5 favorites.

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Death in Venice past Thomas Isle of mann

This is really a novella, just it's a must-read if you're going to visit Venice. (And if you're going to Italia, you definitely need to go to Venice!) Death in Venice sounds grim – and the book delivers what the title promises – but it's a cute, slow, precise meditation on escape and love and, aye, death.

And since nosotros're currently living through a plague of our own, those scenes of death and fearfulness and escapism take get especially relevant. This is a quick and beautiful volume to read before you go to Italian republic. Buy it on Amazon.

The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan

If you lot read these two books well-nigh Venice in a row (as I did), y'all'll certainly experience a certain… vibe about the urban center. It's what I love most about Venice actually – the sense of incredible dazzler and imminent decay and love and loss deeply entwined.

(This is a long-winded mode of maxim, this novel is even darker than Death in Venice.) But Ian McEwan is a skillful and entrancing author, so if you'd like to fully lean into books that take place in Italy that really requite you lot a dark and cute vibe, check this one out. Purchase it on Amazon.

The Neapolitan Novels past Elena Ferrante

Technically this recommendation is for a four-book series, simply once you brainstorm the first one, My Brilliant Friend, yous will want to tear through the whole fix in a week. (Yous won't exist able to – they're long – but is there anything more than pleasurable?) Elena Ferrante wrote these incredibly arresting books nigh a friendship between two women that begins in their babyhood in the rough neighborhoods of Naples and continues through their lives.

It's non a glamorous portrayal of a metropolis that frequently gets a bad rap, only they're so enticing that they inspired many people to travel to Naples. So many, in fact, that there's a companion book to take you to the places where the nigh important scenes took place. Oh, and there's an HBO series too. Buy them on Amazon.

The Concluding Supper by Rachel Cusk

Ane more literary heavy-hitter – this is a nonfiction work past i of my favorite writers (she'south also on my list of Greek must-reads) who details the time she and her hubby and children packed upwardly and moved for a summertime from England to Italy. They meet fellow expats, learn to love eating the simple Italian food, and visit several cute works of art.

Equally is typical in Cusk's books, not a lot really happens, but the beauty of them lies in her way of describing ordinary things with foreign and clarifying metaphors and looking at things in her oddly mannerly manner. This is not Under the Tuscan Sun (also I practice love that film), merely information technology'south one of the most interesting books that take place in Italy I've read. Purchase it on Amazon.

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walters

I have recommended you lot plenty depressing, difficult books that I feel the need to share a lighter diverseness of books to read earlier visiting Italy: the fluffy film-star romance. This is a perfect vacation volume, or a pre-vacation book, to become yous in the mood for that Italian sunshine and sea and movie stars and writers and dearest.

Information technology's near a vacation that turns into a love affair – with a person and with a state as well. It will make you dream nearly the possibilities of your upcoming trip, and put you in a lighter and lifted mood earlier you leave or while yous're sitting in the sun nether a buffet umbrella on the Amalfi Coast. I tore through it in two days sitting in the summer lord's day by a pool – the platonic setting. Buy it on Amazon.

And don't miss: My Favorite Books About Travel