There are few comprehensive accounts of the geography and environment of peninsular (republican) Italy as a whole since Italians tend to approach the subject regionally. The best overview of the geology and geomorphology is in an edited volume on Europe (Sestini 1984). The best overall geographies are now rather old in date (Delano-Smith 1979; Walker 1958) - and one of the best introduced British troops to the peninsula during World War II (Mason 1944). The more laborious approach to assembling an understanding of the geography of Italy is to approach the question regionally through the good offices of the Comunita montane (the government bodies appointed to develop the upland regions - Di Bartolomeo 1976) or the regional monographs accompanying the National Soil Use maps (e. g., Colamonico 1960; Losacco 1944; Rossi Doria 1963; Ruocco 1970). Greater detail on the structural geology of individual map sheets is provided by illustrative notes for each 1:100,000 mapsheet (e. g., Merla, Ercoli, and Torre 1969). A more unusual (at least for most of us today) approach to the geography is to address the issue from the sea and consult the Mediterranean Pilot guides which point out the key landmarks for sailors (Great Britain, Hydrographic Department 1978). The complexity of the interrelationship between the physical environment and humanity is best explored by reading Sallares (2002) on malaria and the edited volume of Bell and Boardman (1992) on erosion (which includes some Mediterranean papers), while bearing in mind the inherent complexity in such evidence (Endfield 1997). The regionality of peninsular Italy can be best approached by detailed reading of the archaeological projects which take a regional approach conscious of the environmental background. These are now many in number, but three from central Italy can be recommended that present a detailed environmental record as well as some detail of the Roman period (Barker 1995; Carandini and Cambi 2002; Malone and Stoddart 1994). Two southern Italian projects are more focused on the prehistoric period, but give a good sense of their local environment (D’Angelo and Orazie Vallino 1994; Delano-Smith 1979). The Campanian region deserves special mention because of its volcanic landscapes and the focal importance of Vesuvius, which is more apparent perhaps to us today than to the republican populations (Frederiksen 1984; Sigurdsson 2002).
World History
