Twenty-three years ago, Beppe Severgnini was a small-time writer at a local daily in his hometown, Crema. For most people, it's a town of 33,000 folded away in the hills outside the Milan metropolis. For him, he says, it's "my everything." So when he was tapped for a job at Milan's Il Giornale, a leading national paper, Severgnini humbly

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) declined. He left journalism altogether to study law — his father's trade.

A few months later, he came to his senses. Il Giornale's editor Indro Montanelli took him aboard and, as if to quell all Severgnini's provincial doubts, made the 27-year-old the paper's London correspondent. That London jaunt not only took Severgnini's fledgling journalistic career to the national level, but also gave him the material for An Italian in Britain, which became a best seller in the U.K. in 1991 and established him as a writer with global appeal. Severgnini, a fan of contradiction, prefers the term "provincial international."

In La Bella Figura, Severgnini's third book to be exported from the Italian peninsula, his propensity for contradiction has found ample room. "Italy," he writes, "is the only workshop in the world that could turn out both Botticellis and Berlusconis." And one into which outsiders enter at their peril. "Your Italy and our Italia are not the same thing," warns the writer. In Botticelli, who strove "to reconcile Plato and Christ in a representation of the beauty that derives from the union of spirit and matter," foreigners only see "flowers, sea and a girl surfing on a seashell. It's a trap. For 500 years, you've been falling into it, and we've been chuckling as we watch."

When composing An Italian in Britain and Ciao, America!, his U.S. best seller, Severgnini was writing for Italians — translating them was an afterthought. "This time it was the other way around. Bella was written for an international audience," he says, even though Italians got first crack at reading it last year. In a typically culinary metaphor, Severgnini says: "It's like when you cook a good meal for your fiancée and your friends love it."

In La Bella Figura, he takes us on a 10-day whirlwind tour of the country. A purposeful but ever-playful host, he stops in Tuscany to poke fun at notions of paradise, but not without criticizing the Tuscans for humoring us. He calls one fantasy "a kind of ultralight meal — stuzzicchini. It's the classic Tuscany book: give people what they want to hear." Then there's the opposite fantasy, equally skewed: "The pasta scotta: pasta swimming in garlic sauce. It's Italy as hell. Heavy stuff. You go to Sicily and how corrupt! Half of that is true." In his book, Severgnini cooks up a compromise dish: "Let's just say that Italy is an offbeat purgatory, full of proud, tormented souls, each of whom is convinced he or she has a hotline to the boss."

Severgnini's book is a bit like a lawyer's defense against a long line of pessimists. Luigi Barzini, a foreign correspondent and prolific writer, in perhaps the most authoritative of Italian portraits, described a country resigned to a downward spiral in his classic book, The Italians. Barzini paints his people as peddlers of "ruses to defeat boredom and discipline, to forget disgrace and misfortune, to lull man's angst to sleep and comfort him in his solitude." Severgnini uses much finer brushstrokes in his interpretation of Italians' shortcomings, which borders on praise.

In Crema, where he's still based, he pauses in his tour to point out the different shades of the cathedral's stonework: "It has taken seven centuries to produce this imperfection, which echoes the equally fascinating imperfection in our heads." But it's not merely a more optimistic spin that sets La Bella Figura apart. Rather, it's how intimately Severgnini discusses his countrymen — he makes you feel as if he's introducing you to old friends.

Even though La Bella Figura poses as an introduction to the Italian mind, it's as much an introduction to the author, proving that he's just as contradictory as his countrymen. If he saw an elderly lady in need of help with her luggage, "I would split in two. While Beppe was being a Good Samaritan, Severgnini would observe the scene and offer congratulations. Beppe would then acknowledge his own compliment, and retire satisfied."

But for all of its folksiness, the book can't escape a weightier encounter with history. Severgnini laments Italy's former playboy PM, Silvio Berlusconi, as the personification and perpetuator of the world's Italian stereotypes. "He had a lethal charm," he says. "My book explains why so many Italians voted for him. But it's not pro or against Berlusconi — it explains how much of Italy was in Berlusconi." That is to say, Berlusconi was Italian to a fault. Because of him, "we wasted a few years in terms of the 'national project.'"

Do such lost years mean that Italy is inevitably slated for decline? The future is clearly weighing on Severgnini's mind, because it requires a sober assessment of the past. "In Italy, you wonder. You go to the rail station and every wall is written on, lights are smashed. It makes me sad. It's because Italians don't care. I think very soon we'll have to decide whether we want to keep our Venetian, carnivalesque fantasy, or maybe make some sacrifice."

For now, Severgnini's contribution is to keep writing, the one thing he'll admit to doing well. "The only thing I could do since I was a child was write. During my military service, I created a lot of couples — I was a good love-letter writer." Now, instead of matchmaking, he maintains "Italians," the daily newspaper Corriere della Serra's popular online column, his attempt to cultivate what in La Bella Figura he calls "the curious glue that, despite everything, binds the nation."

This persistent, if modest, voice may be what bridges the gap between Italy's national languor and a future embrace of the rest of the world. Severgnini has a very specific bridge in mind. "Not the Ponte dei Sospiri [Bridge of Sighs] — it's too expensive. And I'm not talking Golden Gate or Brooklyn, I'm talking one of the little bridges in Venice that goes across a calle. You need that little bridge." It might be strange to label a bridge to the wider world as "little," but in Severgnini's land of contradictions, it seems to make sense.

• MATT SMITH
• Beppe Severgnini's thoughtful, intimate tour of the country's food, art and politics