Best of
Italy

1986

Honey from a Weed: Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and Apulia


Patience Gray - 1986
    Within a few months of its first appearance in 1986 it was hailed as a modern classic. Fiona MacCarthy wrote in The Times that, ‘the book is a large and grandiose life history, a passionate narrative of extremes of experience.’ Jeremy Round called Patience Gray ‘the high priestess of cooking’, whose book ‘pushes the form of the cookery book as far as it can go.’ Angela Carter remarked that ‘it was less a cookery book that a summing-up of the genre of the late-modern British cookery book.’ The work has attracted a cult following in the United States, where passages have been read out at great length on the radio; and it has been anthologized by Paul Levy in The Penguin Book of Food and Drink. It was given a special award by the André Simon Book Prize committee in 1987.

Roman Poems


Pier Paolo Pasolini - 1986
    His poems were at once deeply personal and passionately engaged in the political turmoil of his country. In 1949, after his homosexuality led the Italian Communist Party to expel him on charges of "moral and political unworthiness," Pasolini fled to Rome. This selection of poems from his early impoverished days on the outskirts of Rome to his last (with a backward longing glance at his native Friuli) is at the center of his poetic and filmic vision of modern Italian life as an Inferno."From all these refusals, we know what Pasolini stood against—political ideologies of all kinds, the complacency inherent in the established social order, the corruption of the institutions of church and state. If Pasolini could be said to have stood for anything it was for the struggles of Italy’s working class—both the rural peasants and those barracked in the urban slums at the edges of Italian cities—whose humanity he evoked with great eloquence and nuance. But it is his refusals that animate his legacy with an incandescent rage, a passionate and profound fury that did not, as Zigaina suggests, cry out for death—but for just the opposite." —Nathaniel Rich, The New York Review of BooksPier Paolo Pasolini was born in 1922 in Bologna. In addition to the films for which he is world famous, he wrote novels, poetry, and social and cultural criticism, and was an accomplished painter. He was murdered in 1975 at Ostia, near Rome.

Etruscan Life and Afterlife: A Handbook of Etruscan Studies


Larissa Bonfante - 1986
    Now, scholars are reconstructing a portrait of the wealthy, sophisticated Etruscans whose territory once extended from the Po River to the Bay of Naples. Unfortunately, the wider English-speaking public has had no single resource which synthesizes these new findings and interpretations about the Etruscans. In fact, some sources continue to propagate the traditional myth of the "enigmatic and isolated Etruscans." In response, the eminent Etruscan scholar Larissa Bonfante asked seven other internationally known classicists to join her in providing this "handbook" for the non-specialist as an authoritative and readable guide to the burgeoning Etruscan scholarship. As Bonfante explains in the introductory chapter, "The Etruscans provide an excellent opportunity of turning archaeology into history: this we tried to do, in our chapters, according to our individual directions. Nancy Thomson de Grummond traces the interest in and knowledge of the Etruscans from the earliest days. Mario Torelli provides an independent account of Etruscan history, based on monuments and sources. Jean MacIntosh Turfa belies the cliche of the Etruscans' traditional 'isolation' by surveying the material evidence for their trade with the Phoenicians, Greeks, and other neighbors in the Mediterranean. Marie-Fran�oise Briguet, Friedhelm Prayon, David Tripp, and I survey Etruscan art, architecture, coinage, and daily lives, respectively, Emeline Richardson contributes what she calls a 'primer' in the Etruscan language, a basic archaeological introduction to the Etruscan language, meant to help newcomers read the inscriptions on many of the monuments illustrated and to see these with the interdisciplinary approach so characteristic of, and necessary in, Etruscan studies." The book is profusely illustrated with over 300 photos and maps. Notes and bibliographic references lead to standard texts on the Etruscans and to the more specialized literature in the field. The result is a reliable and lively volume which brings readers into the mainstream of the latest Etruscan scholarship.

Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition


Michael Baxandall - 1986
    Baxandall surveys the main themes of their art criticism and describes how their language conditioned their insights into painting.

Strike One to Educate One Hundred


Chris Aronson Beck - 1986
    More than just a sympathetic appraisal of the Italian Red Brigades, this book also gives an overview of postwar Italian history up to the 1970s from a revolutionary communist point of view.This book does not deal with the more convoluted and depressing part of the Brigades’ history after the kidnapping and killing of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978.

The Sistine Chapel


Carlo Pietrangeli - 1986
    Over 300 full-color illustrations.

Primavera : the restoration of Botticelli's masterpiece


Umberto Baldini - 1986
    

The Oxford Italian Minidictionary: Italian-English/English-Italian


Joyce Andrews - 1986
    It also features a wide range of labels to help guide the user to the appropriate word or expression.- handy pocket dictionary for the student or traveler--now in flexible covers- written with both the English and foreign language user in mind

Violence and the Great Estates in the South of Italy: Apulia, 1900-1922


Frank M. Snowden III - 1986
    In the late nineteenth century this frontier area was settled and agro-business established. In the quasi-colonial context of the South of Italy, the relations between landowners and farm workers were characterized by extreme forms of oppression and brutality. This book is a study of the world the landlords made and of the harsh structures of profit, tenure, and climate they faced. It is also a powerful investigation of the appallingly grim conditions in the teeming agricultural centres of the region and a vivid history of the struggle by the farm workers to win the ordinary decencies of life - clothes, clean water, and bread. In the process, the labourers formed a potent anarcho-syndicalist movement whose history the book relates from the first general strikes in 1901 to the restoration of the landlords' power by fascist terror in 1922.