Francesco. Il primo italiano

Cazzullo's central claim — that Francis of Assisi, not Dante, is the true father of Italian identity — is more provocation than history, and Italian critics have split accordingly. Admirers praise the book's fluency: it moves between the thirteenth century and the present with an ease that turns devotional material into cultural argument, timed deliberately to the 800th anniversary of Francis's death. Skeptics counter that Cazzullo, a journalist rather than a medievalist, borrows the scaffolding of scholars like Chiara Frugoni and Jacques Le Goff without adding to it, producing a readable but thin account that flatters national self-image more than it illuminates the saint. The result reads less as new history than as a patriotic essay wearing history's clothes — engaging, occasionally moving, but argued more than proven.