Orlando Furioso: Part Two
10 best books like Orlando Furioso: Part Two (Ludovico Ariosto): Equal Danger, The Heptameron, Jerusalem Delivered, The Major Works: Including Astrophil and Stella, Tristan: With the Tristran of Thomas, The Death of King Arthur, The Journey Through Wales & The Description of Wales, Le Morte D'Arthur - Volume I, Orlando Innamorato (Orlando in Love), Guide to Greece: Central Greece (Guide to Greece, 1 of 2) (book 1, 2, 7, 9, 10)
| Author | Leonardo Sciascia |
| ISBN | 1590170628 |
District Attorney Varga is shot dead. Then Judge Sanza is killed. Then Judge Azar. Are these random murders, or part of a conspiracy? Inspector Rogas thinks he might know, but as soon as he makes progress he is transferred and encouraged to pin the crimes on the Left. And yet how committed are the cynical,...
| 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 | Torquato Tasso |
| ISBN | 0801863236 |
Arguably the greatest Italian poet after Dante, Torquato Tasso was born in Sorrento in 1544 and died in Rome in 1595, having served as the court poet in Ferrara, been confined for years in a madhouse after attacking a servant with a knife, and composed one of the great works of Renaissance literature....
| Author | Philip Sidney |
| ISBN | 0192840800 |
This authoritative edition brings together a unique combination of Sidney's poetry and prose--all the major writing, complemented by letters and elegies--that reveals the essence of his work and thinking.
Born in 1554, Sir Philip Sidney was hailed as the perfect Renaissance patron, soldier,...
| Author | Gottfried von Straßburg |
Gottfried's version of this legendary romance--in which Tristan and Isolde chance to drink a magic potion that causes them to fall in love--portrays Tristan in the round as an attractive and sophisticated pre-Renaissance man. While Gottfried adheres faithfully to the events as set down by Thomas,...
Recounting the final days of Arthur, this thirteenth-century French version of the Camelot legend, written by an unknown author, is set in a world of fading chivalric glory. It depicts the Round Table diminished in strength after the Quest for the Holy Grail, and with its integrity threatened by the...
| Author | Gerald of Wales |
| ISBN | 0140443398 |
Gerald of Wales was one of the most dynamic and colorful churchmen of the 12th century. His JOURNEY describes a mission to Wales undertaken in 1188 by Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury, with Gerald as his companion. THE DESCRIPTION provides a picture of the day-to-day existence of ordinary Welshmen...
| Author | Thomas Malory |
| ISBN | 1401307809 |
Le Morte d'Arthur (originally spelled Le Morte Darthur, Middle French for "the death of Arthur"[1]) is a reworking of existing tales by Sir Thomas Malory about the legendary King Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Merlin, and the Knights of the Round Table. Malory interprets existing French and English...
| 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 | Pausanias |
| ISBN | 0140442251 |
Written in the second century AD by a Greek traveller for a predominantly Roman audience, Pausanias' Guide to Greece is an extraordinarily literate and well-informed guidebook. A study of buildings, traditions and myth, it describes with precision and eloquence the glory of classical Greece shortly...
| 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 | Michael Psellus |
| ISBN | 0140441697 |
A very readable translation of a memoir/history written roughly a thousand years ago, by a Byzantine scholar and government functionary who, through the vagaries of his near-century of life and service, witnessed, sometimes firsthand, the reigns and deaths of an ungodly number of succeeding Byzantine...
| Author | Italo Calvino |
| ISBN | 0156949520 |
Alternate cover edition can be found here.
In "The Watcher," a member of the Communist Party is assigned to a polling place in Turin's Hospital for Incurables, where he observes the rejects of humanity and a grotesque parody of the democratic process. "Smog" anticipates a preoccupation with...
| Author | Girolamo Cardano |
| ISBN | 1590170164 |
A bright star of the Italian Renaissance, Girolamo Cardano was an internationally-sought-after astrologer, physician, and natural philosopher, a creator of modern algebra, and the inventor of the universal joint. Condemned by the Inquisition to house arrest in his old age, Cardano wrote The Book...
| Author | Anonymous |
| ISBN | 0140442987 |
The Book of Dede Korkut is a collection of twelve stories set in the heroic age of the Oghuz Turks, a nomadic tribe who had journeyed westwards through Central Asia from the ninth century onwards. The stories are peopled by characters as bizarre as they are unforgettable: Crazy Karchar, whose unpredictability...
| Author | Sigrid Undset |
| ISBN | 0394435559 |
It is very hard to do justice to the magnificence of The Master of Hestviken. And there is no question that Sigrid Undset totally deserved the Nobel Prize that she was awarded in 1928. The M of H is a tetralogy in about 1000 pages. Believe it or not, I first read it way over 55 years ago when this bookish teen...
Iphigenia / Phaedra / Athaliah
| Author | Jean Racine |
| ISBN | 0140441220 |
Four and Half Stars.
There are three plays by the French Playwright, Jean Racine (1639 - 1699). The themes for the plays had been taken from Greek mythology (Iphigenia and Phaedra) and Old Testament (Athaliah).
I am not sure as to the mode in which the review can be written for these plays....
| Author | Giacomo Casanova |
| ISBN | 1934997579 |
Born in 1725 to Italian and Spanish parentage, Giacomo Casanova lived a long and exciting life. As a scholar and an adventurer, he traveled widely throughout Europe and Russia associating with rulers and Kings. For a time he was in the service of the army and he became a great political stirrer. But he...
| 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 | Benedetta Craveri |
| ISBN | 8845919994 |
Docente di Letteratura francese all'Università della Tuscia e all'Istituto Universitario di suor Orsola Benincasa, Benedetta Craveri concentra la sua attenzione in questo libro su Versailles e affronta una questione centrale nel corso di tutto l'Ancien Régime: quella legata al potere delle...
| Author | Giovanni Boccaccio |
| ISBN | 0226062767 |
A milestone in feminist literature, this marvelous European romance, narrated by a woman, is considered the first psychological novel in a modern language and a precursor of stream-of-consciousness fiction. Written by Giovanni Boccaccio between 1343 and 1345, The Elegy has never before been available...
| Author | Leonardo da Vinci |
| ISBN | 0486441555 |
Artists: this is a precise, highly mathematic book! Must be read and studied slowly, as Davinci has observed the world around him with painstaking care. In Chapter 74, for instance, I’ve no doubt he made a model walk against wind currents for hours… and just took notes.
Curious about how...
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream
| 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...
