It was April 2025, and Jason Horowitz, then the Rome Bureau Chief for The New York Times, was vacationing in Tuscany with his wife, Claudia, and their two children. He had barely unpacked when the call came: Pope Francis had died. What followed was a vivid glimpse into the classic life of a foreign correspondent: the impossibility of making family plans and articles hastily written in the car on his daughter’s iPad, but also the privilege of being at the center of the news, with a kind of access to political and social circles that few others enjoy.

“One of the many times the Pope ruined my vacation,” Horowitz joked to the audience at the Rizzoli bookstore in Manhattan, where on October 9 he presented his book, The Italian Job, published by Celadon Books. It is an account of his years in Italy and the people he met, from Giorgia Meloni to Giorgio Armani and Elisabetta Canalis (he truly met everyone). The book closes a chapter, since the journalist has since moved to Madrid, but it also offers a lucid, entertaining, sharp, and nuanced analysis of Italy and its political landscape, often rightly seen as a testing ground for political trends that later spread to the United States and across Europe.

“Berlusconi set the mold for Trump, the Italian original before the American knockoff,” Horowitz writes, highlighting how Berlusconi’s rise, like Trump’s, stemmed from a period of political weakness that left both nations vulnerable to businessmen with messianic complexes, unlimited access to airtime, and a charisma that stirred the masses. “I believe the biggest difference, however, is that Berlusconi was an optimist, someone who ultimately wanted the best not just for himself, of course, but for his country as well. Trump has a streak of malice that Berlusconi lacked,” he says.

As mentioned, some pages are devoted to the papacy. Horowitz saw four popes in action: John Paul II, Benedict XVI, Francis, and Leo XIV. Not bad for a Jewish boy from Queens. Others are devoted to the rise of Renzi (“I found his arrogance off-putting”) and of Meloni. Still others contain observations that are never banal, ranging from the audacity required to park in Roman traffic to the nightmare of Italian bureaucracy, and from the myth of dolce far niente (after a while, he admits, he really did feel he was doing nothing) to his constant amazement that a country with a history of “enormous creativity” had become “risk-averse, conservative, and a little uninspiring.” The Italy that emerges is a country forever caught between a past it struggles to let go of and a future it struggles to build.

“Americans are in love with a postcard version of Italy,” Horowitz comments, “and deep down, perhaps, they wish it wouldn’t change.”