The trouble with water, Giulio Boccaletti reminds us in his sweeping “Water: A Biography,” is that it moves. Rivers flood; rain clouds drift away; oceans rise. When human beings lived as nomadic ...

When the German cultural critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin visited Naples with his partner Asja Lascis in 1924, he noted the city’s “rich barbarism”—a striking blend of the sacred and the savage, ...