Then the Great War intervenes. Half a century later, in August of 1964, Alessandro, a white-haired professor, tall and proud, meets an illiterate young factory worker on the road. As they walk toward Monte Prato, a village seventy kilometers away, the old man—a soldier and a hero who became a prisoner and then a deserter, wandering in the hell that claimed Europe—tells him how he tragically lost one family and gained another. The boy, envying the richness and drama of Alessandro's experiences, realizes that this magnificent tale is not merely a story: it's a recapitulation of his life, his reckoning with mortality, and above all, a love song for his family.

    In Reading Turgenev, a lonely country girl escapes her loveless marriage in the arms of a bookish young man. In My House in Umbria, a former madam befriends the other survivors of a terrorist bombing with surprising results. Nominated for the Booker Award.

    An extraordinary montage that resurrects a forgotten and tragic era.

    This cookbook celebrates the delicious fare--from antipasto through dessert--that is served in the restaurants and homes of this area. With many recipes from her own family, Marguerite DiMino Buonopane captures old-world cooking as well as the present-day traditions of the North End.

    Located on Venice’s Calle Vallaresso, near the Piazza San Marco, this legendary restaurant has been, for five decades, the meeting place for artists, writers, royalty, maestros, divas, celebrities, the very rich, and lots of ordinary—but very wise—Americans and Europeans. Everyone from the Windsors and the Onassises and the Burtons to Cole Porter; Ernest Hemingway, and Joan Crawford has come here for great food, fine drinks, and the incomparable ambiance. Now, to the delight of his legions of customers, Arrigo Cipriani shares his favorite stories about Harry’s Bar and its secrets–and reveals for the first time his treasured recipes for the restaurant’s most popular dishes.Harry’s Bar above all, is a bar. Its distinctive mixed drinks were created by its founder, Arrigo’s father, Giuseppe Cipriani, and they remain the social center of the establishment. Therefore, you’ll find careful instructions for making the world-famous Belini—the frosty, frothy combination of rose-colored peach elixir and Prosecco (the Italian champagne)—and the secret of making the Montgomery, named by Hemingway himself, which is nothing less than the driest, most delicious martini in the world.Harry’s Bar is also famous for its sandwiches–mouth-watering, overstuffed, unique concoctions: pale yellow egg sandwiches spiked with anchovies; chunks of freshly poached chicken or shrimp bound with creamy, newly made mayonnaise. The Harry’s Bar club sandwich is a legend in itself, knife-and fork food that’s simply superb.But the bar’s famous risottos and the dozens of pasta dishes—including ravioli, cannelloni, and tagliolini—are the house specialties. Potato gnocchi and simple country food such as polenta, squid, baccala, and beans are transformed into elegant dishes by skillful chefs. Cipriani also invented the sublime dish known as carpaccio and the glorious risotto alla primavera, brilliant ideas that have been imitated all over the world; the original appear here for the first time.The secret of Harry’s Bar is not only its great drinks and magnificent food, but also its extraordinary atmosphere, in which high spirits pour forth happily. Arrigo Cipriani captures this spirit and tradition, and delivers it all in his own inimitable style. Opinionated and full of surprises, Cipriani ultimately reveals not only the secrets of his kitchen and bar but also the lavish, full color photographs by Christopher Baker make the feast a visual one as well. The Harry’s Bar Cookbook is much more than a cookbook: it’s a enduring experience to be savored and enjoyed.

    First of all because we women have been crying for two thousand years. So let's laugh now, even at ourselves" - Franca Rame"Set at the point where reality and ideology rub up against each other, [these] monologues are vivid, concise and entertaining comments on the female condition…comic-but-angry, raw-but-precise" - The Independent

    Since its publication in Italy, Claudio Pavone’s masterwork has become indispensable to anyone seeking to understand this period and its continuing importance for the nation’s identity. Pavone casts a sober eye on his protagonists’ ethical and ideological motivations. He uncovers a multilayered conflict, in which class antagonisms, patriotism and political ideals all played a part. A clear understanding of this complexity allows him to explain many details of the post-war transition, as well as the legacy of the Resistance for modern Italy. In addition to being a monumental work of scholarship, A Civil War is a folk history, capturing events, personalities and attitudes that were on the verge of slipping entirely out of recollection to the detriment of Italy’s understanding of itself and its past.

    Included are 34 examples of Italian verse in the original with English translations on facing pages. Twenty-one poets are represented, from Saint Francis of Assisi, author of the first memorable Italian lyric, "Cancio delle creature," to Salvatore Quasimodo, winner of the 1959 Nobel Prize for Literature. Also included are works by Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, and Montale, as well as such lesser known but significant poets as Compiuta Donzella and Cavalcanti. There are even important works by Boccaccio and Michelangelo.In addition to full Italian texts with expert literal translations on facing pages, this edition contains a wealth of biographical and critical commentary.

    He spent many years there as director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Lisbon. He even wrote Requiem in Portuguese; it had to be translated into Italian for publication in his native Italy.Requiem's narrator has an appointment to meet someone on a quay by the Tagus at twelve. But, it turns out, not twelve noon, twelve midnight, so he has a long time to while away. As the day unfolds, he has many encounters—a young junky, a taxi driver who is not familiar with the streets, several waiters, a gypsy, a cemetery keeper, the mysterious Isabel, an accordionist, in all almost two dozen people both real and illusionary. Finally he meets The Guest, the ghost of the long dead great poet Fernando Pessoa. Part travelog, part autobiography, part fiction, and even a bit of a cookbook, Requiem becomes an homage to a country and its people, and a farewell to the past as the narrator lays claim to a literary forebear who, like himself, is an evasive and many-sided personality.

    73 black-and-white halftones; 16 maps.

    A contemporary of Columbus, Lorenzo is hardly known in the English-speaking world as a major Quattrocento writer, author of a large and varied body of poetry as well as an important literary treatise. His poetry and patronage were instrumental in renewing the vernacular literature of his age after a period of stagnation.That Lorenzo's literary writings were for the most part never translated is a fascinating curiosity of history, attributable to the irreverent, bawdy subject matter of many of his poems, objections to his authoritarian politics, and the unconventional features of his poetic realism. Yet Lorenzo is now seen as the most interesting exponent of the cultural renaissance that he encouraged. His longer poems in particular reveal the central concerns, everyday activities, and favorite ideas of his day. No other Florentine writer succeeds in capturing as he does the beauty, seasonal changes, and rhythms of life of the Tuscan countryside. His poetic realism is that which sets him apart from his age, yet makes him such a vivid portrayer of it. The availability of his works in English will serve to modify and enlarge our conception of the Florentine Renaissance.

    But the CIA's spies had few qualms when it came to cultivating terrorist organisations and interfering in the internal politics of Cold War Italy. Puppetmasters reveals how US intelligence services exploited the P2 masonic lodge to prop up friendly Christian Democrat-dominated governments and counter the growing political influence of the Italian Communist Party. It was a ruthless strategy involving coup plots, right wing terrorist bombings and the manipulation of the Red Brigades. And it gave Italy one of the bloodiest and most protracted periods of terrorist violence ever seen in a modern, industrialised society.

    Georges Didi-Huberman disrupts this story with a new look—and a new way of looking—at the fifteenth-century painter Fra Angelico. In doing so, he alters our understanding of both early Renaissance art and the processes of art history.A Florentine painter who took Dominican vows, Fra Angelico (1400-1455) approached his work as a largely theological project. For him, the problems of representing the unrepresentable, of portraying the divine and the spiritual, mitigated the more secular breakthroughs in imitative technique. Didi-Huberman explores Fra Angelico's solutions to these problems—his use of color to signal approaching visibility, of marble to recall Christ's tomb, of paint drippings to simulate (or stimulate) holy anointing. He shows how the painter employed emptiness, visual transformation, and displacement to give form to the mystery of faith.In the work of Fra Angelico, an alternate strain of Renaissance painting emerges to challenge rather than reinforce verisimilitude. Didi-Huberman traces this disruptive impulse through theological writings and iconographic evidence and identifies a widespread tradition in Renaissance art that ranges from Giotto's break with Byzantine image-making well into the sixteenth century. He reveals how the techniques that served this ultimately religious impulse may have anticipated the more abstract characteristics of modern art, such as color fields, paint spatterings, and the absence of color.

    Standing in the tradition of Emile Zola's famous J'accuse polemic against the Dreyfus trial at the end of the nineteenth-century, the historian Carlo Ginzburg draws on his work on witchcraft trials in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries to dissect the weaknesses and contradictions of the state's case in this late-twentieth-century political show-trial and reflects more generally on the similarities and differences between the roles of the historian and the judge.

    

    At the dawn of the 14th century, while Dante was writing The Divine Comedy, Giotto created an extraordinary visual story -- one of the rear instance in which we can rightly speak of a "revolution" in the history of painting. The human dimension melds with the sacred, reality prevails over mystical detachment, feelings burst onto the scene, figures and architecture break with rigid linearity and acquire volume and impact. A unitary concept brings together all the frescoed surfaces (sidewalls, triumphal arch, barrel vault ceiling, inside façade), and the remarkably varied narrative of the episodes and the characters is superbly orchestrated with stringent coherence and the sheer communicative power of the images. This volume follows Giotto's frescoes scene by scene, illustrating the entire visual and narrative itinerary in the Scrovegni Chapel, explaining the allegorical content and revealing, in turn, the technical, stylistic and expressive aspects of one of the most important pictorial cycles in European art.Milanese art historian Stefano Zuffi has published more than sixty volumes popularizing culture. - See more at: http://www.skira.net/giotto-6045.html...

    Press edition of the letters of Florentine humanist Poggius (1380-1459) to his friend de Niccolis regarding the rediscovery of lost classical texts. Translated (from the Latin) with notes by Phyllis Walter Goodhart Gordon. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portla

    In this case we are dealing with a period in the past that has been extraordinarily celebrated, studied and loved, so as to achieve an almost mythic status: the age of the Renaissance in Medicean Florence. Ten years after the conclusion of restoration work, Franco Cardini distils the essence of countless scholarly studies on the subject in this richly illustrated volume. His synthesis is completed by Lucia Ricciardi's essay, full of useful information on the heraldic, symbolic and allegorical imagery related to the Medici family.

    The author of Italian Days captures the essence of these irresistible isles. A perfect gift for lovers of Italy. 110 color photographs.

    Savinio tears apart, reassembles and modernises some of the most famous stories of all time. As Breton commented 'The whole of the modern myth still in process of formation is founded on two bodies of work - Alberto Savinio's and his brother'.

    He returned many times to photograph the angels & the crumbling walls around them. Brigidi began to feel that the poetry of the angels could be best communicated when combined with the response of another artist who perceived the angels message. That other artist was Robert Bly, whose powerful poems, both old & new, allowed the marriage of words & pictures to happen. Full-color photos.

    Laws, council minutes, records of the commune's revenue and expenditure, wills and other charters from the thirteenth century are among the plentiful material which makes up the picture of the city republic's institutions and those who ran them. The main themes are the political institutions of the city, and the involvement of the citizens in them. The religion of the Sienese is also investigated. This is a portrait of a special, but not untypical, society which was engaged in an experiment in oligarchic self-government. Although the milieu was urban, Siena's bankers and tradesmen, craftsmen and those involved in transport and agricultural labour, were in many cases landowners: the city was dependent on and greatly involved with its rural environment. The precocity of the commune's governmental methods and the wealth of information that has survived mean that the medieval life of this famous and beautiful Tuscan city can be depicted in full and convincing detail.