Italy, Carlo Levi once famously wrote, is like an artichoke: you peel away a layer of leaves, only to find another lying below. It was to uncover what was really there, to expose the parts of the country not normally seen by tourists, that Tobias Jones settled in Parma, the home of parmesan cheese and smoked ham, in the late 1990s. The Dark Heart of Italy is the engaging result, a look that is both affectionate and full of sympathy but at the same time profoundly depressing. Levi's artichoke, it seems, is not in a good state.
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