This Beautiful Country

Italy is renowned for its antiquity, classical literature, philosophy, and modern-day culture, cuisine and fashion, but what has gone largely overlooked and undocumented, even by its people, is its unique biodiversity. Italy has over 58,000 different species of wildlife, of which 4,777 are endemic, the highest in Europe. Italy provides a home for a third of all European flora and fauna, with a vast range of fruit and vegetable varieties: more grape varieties than France, more wheat than the US, and more olives than Spain.

This Beautiful Country by Edward Cutler delves into this often-ignored aspect of Italy. Edward Cutler, an art historian by trade, began to explore this history when, four years ago on his small Tuscan farm, he found a salamander that turned out to be endemic to that specific location. In understanding how Italy came together as a country, one of the youngest and still geologically active landscapes in the world, Ed realised that this natural history has also had an incredibly important influence on its human history, especially its food culture and low-impact agriculture.