Jerusalem Delivered

Author	Baldassare Castiglione
ISBN	0486427021

Widely acknowledged as the sixteenth century's most significant handbook on leadership, The Book of the Courtier offers an insider's view of court life and culture during the Renaissance. Set in 1507, when the author himself was an attaché to the Duke of Urbino, the book consists of a series of fictional...

Author	Ludovico Ariosto
ISBN	0192836773

Perhaps it speaks more to the age I live in than that of the author, but I'm always surprised to find a reasonable, rational mind on the other end of the pen. Though Ariosto's unusual work is full of prejudice and idealism, it is constantly shifting, so that now one side seems right, and now the other.

His...

Author

Marguerite de Navarre

In the early 1500s five men and five women find themselves trapped by floods and compelled to take refuge in an abbey high in the Pyrenees. When told they must wait days for a bridge to be repaired, they are inspired - by recalling Boccaccio's Decameron - to pass the time in a cultured manner by each telling...

Author	Niccolò Machiavelli
ISBN	0917974573

Mandragola = The Mandrake, Niccolò Machiavelli
The Mandrake is a satirical play by Italian Renaissance philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli. Although the five-act comedy was published in 1524 and first performed in the carnival season of 1526, Machiavelli likely wrote The Mandrake in 1518 as...

Author	Benvenuto Cellini
ISBN	0140447180

Benvenuto Cellini was a celebrated Renaissance sculptor and goldsmith - a passionate craftsman who was admired and resented by the most powerful political and artistic personalities in sixteenth-century Florence, Rome and Paris. He was also a murderer and a braggart, a shameless adventurer who...

Author	Dante Alighieri
ISBN	0192839357

Vita Nuova (1292-94) is regarded as one of Dante's most profound creations. The thirty-one poems in the first of his major writings are linked by a lyrical prose narrative celebrating and debating the subject of love. Composed upon Dante's meeting with Beatrice and the "Lord of Love," it is a love story...

Author	Lucan
ISBN	0192839497

Lucan's epic poem on the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, unfinished at the time of his death, stands beside the poems of Virgil and Ovid in the first rank of Latin epic. This newly annotated, free verse translation conveys the full force of Lucan's writing and his grimly realistic view of the subject....

Author	Matteo Maria Boiardo
ISBN	1932559019

Like Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, Boiardo's chivalric stories of lords and ladies first entertained the culturally innovative court of Ferrara in the Italian Renaissance. Inventive, humorous, inexhaustible, the story recounts Orlando's love-stricken pursuit...

Author	John Dryden
ISBN	0192840770

John Dryden (1631-1700) was the leading writer of his day and a major cultural spokesman following the restoration of Charles II in 1660. His work includes political poems, satire, religious apologias, translations, critical essays and plays. This authoritative edition brings together a unique...

Author	Pietro Aretino
ISBN	1843910365

Bawdy and thoroughly risque, this 16th-century masterpiece is the work of Pietro Aretino, widely regarded as the originator of European pornographic writing. Determined that her daughter should not be ignorant of the ways of men and love, Nanna seeks to “educate” the naïve Pippa. She tells...

Author	Giacomo Leopardi
ISBN	0374235031

A New York Times Notable Book for 2011

Giacomo Leopardi is Italy's greatest modern poet, the first European writer to portray and examine the self in a way that feels familiar to us today. A great classical scholar and patriot, he explored metaphysical loneliness in entirely original ways....

Author	Propertius
ISBN	0192835734

Toujours dans la veine des poètes latins, après un Catulle tout à la fois impétueux et tendre, après un Tibulle irénique et volage, voici Properce, passionnément fidèle et attaché à sa Cynthie, et terriblement voluptueux. C'est sans doute de ces trois auteurs le plus vivant, le...

Author	Francesco Colonna
ISBN	0500285497

One of the most famous books in the world, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, read by every Renaissance intellectual and referred to in studies of art and culture ever since, was first published in English by Thames & Hudson in 1999.
It is a strange, pagan, pedantic, erotic, allegorical, mythological...

Author	Eugenio Montale
ISBN	8804340487

Per Montale la realtà è segnata da una insanabile frattura fra l'individuo e il mondo, che provoca un senso di frustrazione e di estraneità, un malessere esistenziale. Rispetto a questa visione, la poesia si pone per Montale come espressione profonda e personale della propria ricerca di dignità...

Author	Ben Jonson
ISBN	0140422773

One of the greatest English playwrights of the seventeenth century, Ben Jonson was also a deeply influential lyric poet, whose poetry combined classical ideals with a vigorous interest in contemporary life and colloquial language. The Complete Poems contains all the volumes of poetry Jonson published...

Author

Philip Sidney

Okay, I'm not going to sit here and pretend I read all of this. I'm not even going to claim that heretofore allegedly there may or may not have been a point the duration of which is uncertain that a person, namely myself, might have concurrently been disposed to a proportionate reading of the aforementioned...

Author	Giordano Bruno
ISBN	0803261047

"Among the heretics of every age, we find men who are filled with the highest kind of religious feeling," Albert Einstein said. He might have been referring to the sixteenth-century Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, who was tried by two Inquisitions and burned at the stake in Rome in 1600.Bruno's...

Author	Dino Campana
ISBN	0932440177

due anni prima la critica li ha accolti con una sostanziale indifferenza, ma lei li intercetta e ne rimane affascinata. è il 1916, e quel capolavoro dei canti orfici non se li fila nessuno. sibilla aleramo invece ne viene rapita. scrive a dino campana e inizia con lui una fitta corrispondenza epistolare....

Author	Publius Papinius Statius
ISBN	0801886368

A classical epic of fratricide and war, the Thebaid retells the legendary conflict between the sons of Oedipus — Polynices and Eteocles — for control of the city of Thebes. The Latin poet Statius reworks a familiar story from Greek myth, dramatized long before by Aeschylus in his tragedy Seven against...

Author	Francesco Petrarca
ISBN	8806179497

In concomitanza con il settimo centenario della nascita del poeta, la curatrice, tra i massimi specialisti del Petrarca volgare, conclude un lavoro durato quasi vent'anni. Commentando minuziosamente ogni verso e ogni espressione petrarchesca, il fittissimo richiamo dei testi classici e della...

Author	Giovanni Verga
ISBN	8804228946

A conclusione del mio personale ciclo "rileggiamo Verga per vedere se riesco a cavarne qualcosa che fino ad ora non mi ha minimamente dato", posso solo concludere che ritengo la raccolta di novelle il suo testo migliore. Intendiamoci, il Verga non cambia, le storie sono sempre pessimiste, scritte...