THE LAST ITALIAN: Portrait of a People...

THE LAST ITALIAN: Portrait of a People by William Murray (Touchstone: $10). William Murray has spent much of his life in Italy, and he writes about the country with a lover’s mixture of affection and exasperation. His fond description of a modest trattoria in Rome expands into a discussion of the traditional dining habits of Italians. He condemns the careless postwar despoliation of the once-beautiful countryside and towns with equal intensity, damning modern Naples as “an assault on the senses.” His accounts of the financial chicanery that led to the fall of the great publishing house of Rizzoli Editore, and the seamy night life in Milan that involves drugs, rich playboys and young women hoping to become high- fashion models, stand out as examples of how to report scandalous activities without stooping to tabloid vulgarity.