The recent Giorgio Morandi exhibition, so artfully installed in the Lehman Wing of the Metropolitan Museum, was for many an opportunity, perhaps for the first time, to discover a surprisingly unfamiliar Italy—not the Italy of Roman antiquity, nor the Italy of the Renaissance city-states, not even the Italy of Baroque splendor—cultural landscapes with which an American public is reasonably enough acquainted. With Morandi, instead, we entered a far less well-traveled territory: the Italy dating from the threshold of the twentieth century through the end of the Second World War. It was a period during which, for more than twenty years of Fascist government, the country existed in a self-inflicted isolation willed by a purposeful, nation-obsessed, but fundamentally provincial, regime that is euphemistically referred to as the ventennio (twenty-year span). This, of itself, would have been reason enough for our Anglo-American culture to pay scant attention to “modern” Italy. Philosophers such as Benedetto Croce, Giovanni Papini, and Giovanni Gentile, writers of the stature of Pirandello and D’Annunzio, and a number of accomplished and significant artists, including, of course, Giorgio Morandi, are, to this day, little known beyond Italy’s borders; or, more accurately, not well enough known. Perhaps only Giacomo Puccini, by virtue of the universality and magic of his music, has been genuinely embraced and understood everywhere from the very beginning. Whatever the cause, Italian culture, from 1900 until the post-war Miracolo Economico and the fashion and design explosion of the 1960s, has remained somewhat removed and out of focus.