Through the often grim and bloody events of fifty years which changed the world, his life is a triumph of the human spirit.

    Piccolo shows boys and girls about sharing their strength with those who are smaller, younger or weaker.

    But Marietta and Elena, two dear friends at the Ospedale della Pietà, a world-famous orphanage and music school for girls, know little of that milieu–until they come of age. Elena is forced to wed the head of the Celano clan, a jealous, brutal man, while Marietta marries Domenico Torrisi, whose family vendetta with the Celanos is centuries old. Tradition dictates that the friends should never speak again, but their bond is too strong to break. As the French Revolution unsettles all of Europe, Elena’s husband frames Domenico and he becomes a political prisoner. Marietta and Elena plot to save him, and the women discover that Venetian masks have noble purposes, too–but will their efforts put their own lives at risk?Embodying the glitter and the treachery of the city it portrays, The Venetian Mask will keep you turning pages long into the night.

    The 501 most commonly used Italian verbs are listed in table form, one verb per page, and conjugated in all tenses, identified by English infinitive forms. Verbs are both regular and irregular, and are presented alphabetically for easy reference. Added material related to verbs and verb usage is also presented, including lists of hundreds more regular verbs, idiomatic verb usage, and more.

    Now, after nearly fifteen years of effort, the restoration is finally complete. This unique volume-the first to document the project-is the result of an unparalleled international photographic campaign. For the first time, the restored Chapel is shown in its entirety, from the Creation to the Last Judgment. Glorious, full-color photographs-250 in all-portray the frescoes both before and after their restoration, providing an unforgettable view of the meticulous work that many believe restored the frescoes to their original High Renaissance splendor.Originally created in the late 1400s, the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel are the best-known of all the Vatican masterpieces. As early as 1502, however, tourists began noting the damage wrought by smoke and crumbling walls. By 1980 the need for conservation appeared to be dire. The restoration team had to contend with centuries of decay-structural fractures in the walls and ceilings, soot and dust accumulation, and rainwater seepage that left white patches on every surface. Artisans in previous centuries had made attempts at conservation, but often did more harm than good; the frescoes were found to be coated with many layers of "protective" glue that had yellowed and darkened with age.Though many art historians opposed the restoration, believing that Michelangelo was a somber artist who worked in dark and muted colors, the endeavor presents frescoes that are gloriously vivid, setting the chapel aglow with their brilliance. In addition, they provide new insights about Michelangelo's brushstroke techniques, and add more information to a centuries-old debate over how he worked with the wet plaster surface of the frescoes.Written with Gianluigi Colalucci, the technical overseer of the restoration, the text provides an intimate understanding of this masterpiece of Renaissance art. It explains the various forensic studies carried out in the course of the project, the pragmatic concerns of the restoration, and the many problems of historical approach that were confronted. This volume, including remarkable new pictures of the Chapel frescoes, belongs in the libraries of every art historian and student of the Italian Renaissance.

    Perfect for dipping into a steaming cappuccino or as an accompaniment to ice cream or a glass of wine, biscotti are endlessly versatile. They can be covered with chocolate, embellished with spices or nuts or kept in their simple, sophisticated original form. Light and healthy, they adapt easily to both casual and formal occasions. Filled with tips on baking and serving biscotti, as well as with delicious historical anecdotes, this small-format cookbook is the perfect introduction to a classic Italian experience.

    Pier Paolo Pasolini was uncompromising, homosexual, anti-Fascist, anti-Communist, anti-clerical, even as he yielded to his callings as world-renowned novelist (A Violent Life, The Ragazzi), poet, polemicist, and filmmaker. Photographs. Avertising.

    The heart of the story is the mass migration that took place between 1880 and 1924, when a whole culture left its ancient roots to settle in the cities and towns of America.

    In a first-person monologue that bends and mutates language and historical fact, Johan Padan and the Discovery of the Americas is a brilliant, vividly imagined retelling of Christopher Columbus's voyage to America. Told by a last-minute conscript assigned to clean the shipboard pig stalls, who goes on to be adopted by a tribe of Indians and help them fight conquistadors, it posits a riotous alternate history in which the dynamics between native and white, male and female, history and comedy are never what they seem.

    He was a critic of art, architecture and society. He was a Victorian sage and gifted painter. He goal with his writings was to cause widespread cultural and social change. This combination of the religious intensity of the Evangelical Revival and the artistic excitement of English Romantic painting laid the foundations of Ruskin's later views.The Encyclopedia Britannica sums up Ruskin as follows. "Ruskin has gradually been rediscovered. His formative importance as a thinker about ecology, about the conservation of buildings and environments, about Romantic painting, about art education, and about the human cost of the mechanization of work became steadily more obvious. The outstanding quality of his own drawings and watercolors (modestly treated in his lifetime as working notes or amateur sketches) was increasingly acknowledged, as was his role as a stimulus to the flowering of British painting, architecture, and decorative art in the second half of the 19th century."Giotto was a 13th century Italian painter and architect. He is generally considered the first of the great artists who contributed to the Italian Renaissance. Giotto's masterwork is the decoration of the Scrovegni Chapel commonly called the Arena Chapel, completed around 1305. His frescos depict the life of the Virgin and the life of Christ. They are some of the greatest artistic works of the Renaissance.

    For over fifty years Farnese commissioned buildings and paintings of the highest quality from the major artists active in the city. Using a wealth of hitherto unpublished material, Clare Robertson provides the first thorough reconstruction of Farnese's development and influence as a patron, at the same time, raising important questions about the attitudes and motives of Renaissance patrons and challenging a number of current art-historical assumptions about patronage. She shows how Farnese began his patronage with costly works of decorative art and thus embarked on an extensive campaign of secular commissions from artists such as Titian, Vasari, and Taddeo Zuccaro. His secular patronage culminated with his magnificent villa at Caprarola, designed by Vignola. Only in the 1560s, after some thirty years as a Cardinal, did he turn to commissions for religious works, mainly in response to Counter Reformation pressures and because of his fervent desire to become Pope. The emphasis of his patronage then changed dramatically as he embarked on building an impressive number of new churches, including the Gesu, the most influential church of the late sixteenth century. This handsomely illustrated study of a major artistic figure will be indispensable to students and scholars of sixteenth-century Italy and its art.

    One by one, he describes the stories they portray, their meticulous composition, and the crucial and surprising role of fate in the commission for the church of San Francesco. Originally published in 1993, the book quickly achieved a cult following; this new edition includes, for the first time, Aldous Huxley's "The Best Picture," the famous essay that first inspired Pope-Hennessy to seek out the luminous and enigmatic works that now constitute the pilgrimage known as The Piero della Francesca Trail. The thousands of tourists who travel to Tuscany each year to follow the trail will welcome the republication of this beautifully designed volume.

    -- Booklist Most interesting... and a major contribution to the understanding of Italian character in America. -- Gay Talese

    Not aimed at excising theological concerns from Dante, this approach instead attempts to break out of the hermeneutic guidelines that Dante structured into his poem and that have resulted in theologized readings whose outcomes have been overdetermined by the poet. By detheologizing, the reader can emerge from this poet's hall of mirrors and discover the narrative techniques that enabled Dante to forge a true fiction. Foregrounding the formal exigencies that Dante masked as ideology, Barolini moves from the problems of beginning to those of closure, focusing always on the narrative journey. Her investigation--which treats such topics as the visionary and the poet, the One and the many, narrative and time--reveals some of the transgressive paths trodden by a master of mimesis, some of the ways in which Dante's poetic adventuring is indeed, according to his own lights, Ulyssean.

    The four plays in this volume present different facets of his prolific output, which focused on the lives of the Neapolitan people, their dubious cunning nourished by centuries of hunger, their fantasies and their love of life. The Local Authority, Grand Magic and Filumena Marturano are translated by Carlo Ardito, and Napoli Milionaria was translated by Peter Tinniswood for the Royal National Theatre's production in 1991.

    Hand and Mind persuasively argues that because gestures directly transfer mental images to visible forms, conveying ideas that language cannot always express, we must examine language and gesture together to unveil the operations of the mind.

    By translating and presenting for the first time many letters previously overlooked by other volumes, this collection greatly expands what the English-speaking world knows of him, both politically and personally. These extracts from his pre-prison correspondence—with his wife and her sister, international communist leaders, and fellow Italian revolutionaries—show his most important ideas at their beginnings, and give a well rounded picture of Gramsci’s political, intellectual, and emotional development.Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) was a founding member of the Italian Communist Party, and among the twentieth century's most influential theorists.

    Much archival and technical work has been done concerning him and his work (including the restoration of his great fresco cycle in Arezzo and of many of his other paintings and frescoes).

    Unique in so many ways, Venice is also unique in its relation to writing. London has Dickens, Paris has Balzac, Saint Petersburg has Dostoevsky, Dublin has Joyce, but there is simply no comparable writer for, or out of, Venice.Venice effectively disappeared from history altogether in 1797 after its defeat by Napoleon. From then on, it seemed to exist as a curiously marooned spectacle. Literally marooned--the city mysteriously growing out of the sea, the beautiful stone impossibly floating on water--but temporally marooned as well, stagnating outside history. Yet as spectacle, as the beautiful city par excellence, the city of art, the city as art and as spectacular example, as the greatest and richest republic in the history of the world, now declined and fallen, Venice became an important site for the European imagination.Watery, dark, silent, a place of sensuality and secrecy; of masks and masquerading; of an always possibly treacherous beauty; of Desdemona and Iago, Shylock, Volpone; of conspiracy and courtesans in Otway; an obvious setting for many Gothic novels--Venice is not written from the inside but variously appropriated from without. Venice--the place, the name, the dream--seems to lend itself to a whole variety of appreciations, recuperations, and and hallucinations. In decay and decline, yet saturated with secret sexuality--suggesting a heady compound of death and desire--Venice becomes for many writers what is was for Byron: both "the greenest island of my imagination" and a "sea-sodom." It also, as this book tries to show, plays a crucial role in the development of modern writing. Tony Tanner skillfully lays before us the many ways in which this dreamlike city has been summoned up, depicted, dramatized--then rediscovered or transfigured in selected writings through the years.

    After a main filmography covering 558 Spaghetti Westerns, another section provides filmographies of personnel--actors and actresses, directors, musical composers, scriptwriters, cinematographers. Appendices provide lists of the popular Django films and the Sartana films, a listing of U.S.-made Spaghetti Western lookalikes, top ten and twenty lists and a list of the genre's worst.

    The recipes include such tantalizing dishes as Penne with Hazelnuts, Spaghetti with Sun-dried Tomatoes, Pasta Fritters, Artichoke Gnocchi, Crepes Stuffed with Watercress in Sweet Pepper Sauce, Tagliatelle with Scallops and Fennel, Lasagne with Shellfish, Penne with Duck and Orange and Baked Green Taglioni with Ham. Diane Seed has brought together delicious combinations of ingredients with dry and fresh pastas, stuffed pastas, crepes and gnocchi.

    From the WORLD OF ART series, a survey of the artistic achievements of the Renaissance sculptors from Nicola Pisano through Brunelleschi and Donatello to Michelangelo and Cellini.

    Running it required not only public works and services but also specialised law. This innovative work traces the development of that law and system in the main areas of administration. The book incorporates and develops previous historical and topographical works by relating their findings to the Roman legal framework, building up a portrait of public administration, unusually comprehensive for the ancient world.

    Sicily is a microcosm of the whole of Western and Mediterranean history, a place where more than five thousand years of history can be seen in a concentrated and accessible area. All the diverse cultures that eventually came to make up Sicily are here: the early tribes who gave the island its name, the Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, French, Spaniards, and others. Also presented are the many leaders and rulers of Sicily, including Greek tyrants, Roman statesmen, Norman kings with their brilliant courts, the heroes of the many movements for freedom that took place on the island, the leading Sicilian thinkers of the eighteenth century, and such figures as Garibaldi and the Sicilian patriots of the Risorgimento. Additionally, there are vivid descriptions of the island's varied historic sites, such as the prehistoric remains of the Neolithic Age, especially on the outlying islands; the dramatic ruins of the Greek temples and theaters of Agrigento, Segesta, Solinunte, and Syracuse; the early Cathaginian settlement and important archeological site of Motya; the Roman villas and amphitheaters; the Byzantine and Norman palaces and churches of Palermo, Monreale, and Cefalu with their distinct Arabic influence; the Baroque cities of Catania, Noto, and Ragusa; the monuments of Messina; and the breathtaking natural beauty of such sites as Taormina. Retold are the details behind such events as the rise of the Greek cities on the island (Sicily was known in ancient times as "Magna Graecia" - "Greater Greece"), the Roman takeover, the arrival of the Byzantines and Arabs with their unique contributions, and the Norman conquest of the island that actually took place five years before that of England. This volume also gives a vivid presentation of the circumstances that led to the heroic uprising known as the "Sicilian Vespers" and the many subsequent