The New Italian Poetry, 1945 to the Present: A Bilingual Anthology (1981), edited by Lawrence R. Smith, is a substantial anthology featuring the most important Italian poets since World War II.

A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943—1988 (2003), by Paul Ginsborg, has been hailed by reviewers as the best single work on postwar Italian history. It comprehensively covers a period of unprecedented economic, social, and demographic change in Italy.

The Cambridge History of Italian Literature (1999), edited by Peter Brand and Lino Pertile, is a comprehensive survey of hundreds of years of Italy's literary tradition. All quotations are translated into English, and the book includes maps, chronological charts, and up-to-date bibliographies.

T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) was published at about the same time as Montale's Cuttlefish Bones, and the two poets are often compared. The Waste Land expresses the sense...