Italy

Author	Dante Alighieri
ISBN	0679433139

The Divine Comedy describes Dante's descent into Hell with Virgil as a guide; his ascent of Mount Purgatory and encounter with his dead love, Beatrice; and finally, his arrival in Heaven. Examining questions of faith, desire and enlightenment, the poem is a brilliantly nuanced and moving allegory...

Author	Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
ISBN	0679731210

The Leopard is a story of a decadent and dying aristocracy threatened by the forces of revolution and democracy. Set against the political upheavals of Italy in the 1860s, it focuses on Don Fabrizio, a Sicilian prince of immense sensual appetites, wealth, and great personal magnetism. Around this...

Author	Italo Calvino
ISBN	0156453800

"Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his." So...

Author

Umberto Eco

Foucault's Pendulum is divided into ten segments represented by the ten Sefiroth. The novel is full of esoteric references to the Kabbalah. The title of the book refers to an actual pendulum designed by the French physicist Léon Foucault to demonstrate the rotation of the earth, which has symbolic...

Author

Italo Calvino

A landmark new translation of a Calvino classic, a whimsical, spirited novel that imagines a life lived entirely on its own terms

Cosimo di Rondó, a young Italian nobleman of the eighteenth century, rebels against his parents by climbing into the trees and remaining there for the rest of his...

Author	William Shakespeare
ISBN	0743482751

Much Ado About Nothing, abridged.

CLAUDIO: So, um, Hero, I sorta maybe like you a whole lot will you go to the prom with me?

HERO: We should get married! Squeeeeeee!

BEATRICE: Pfft. Love is for stupid losers who are stupid.

BENEDICK: You know, you might get laid more...

Author	Elizabeth Gilbert
ISBN	0143038419

A celebrated writer's irresistible, candid, and eloquent account of her pursuit of worldly pleasure, spiritual devotion, and what she really wanted out of life.

Around the time Elizabeth Gilbert turned thirty, she went through an early-onslaught midlife crisis. She had everything an...

Author	Marguerite Yourcenar
ISBN	0374529264

Both an exploration of character and a reflection on the meaning of history, Memoirs of Hadrian has received international acclaim since its first publication in France in 1951. In it, Marguerite Yourcenar reimagines the Emperor Hadrian's arduous boyhood, his triumphs and reversals, and finally,...

Author	Ross King
ISBN	0142000159

Brunelleschi's Dome is the story of how a Renaissance man bent men, materials, and the very forces of nature to build an architectural wonder. Not a master mason or carpenter, Filippo Brunelleschi was a goldsmith and clock maker. Over twenty-eight years, he would dedicate himself to solving puzzles...

Author	Giorgio Bassani
ISBN	1400044227

Giorgio Bassani's acclaimed novel of unrequited love and the plight of the Italian Jews on the brink of World War II has become a classic of modern Italian literature.
Made into an Academy Award winning film in 1970, "The Garden of the Finzi Continis "is a richly evocative and nostalgic depiction...

Author

Louis de Bernières

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is set in the early days of the second world war, before Benito Mussolini invaded Greece. Dr Iannis practices medicine on the island of Cephalonia, accompanied by his daughter, Pelagia, to whom he imparts much of his healing art. Even when the Italians do invade, life isn’t...

Author

Roberto Calasso

Στους γάμους του Κάδμου και της Αρμονίας ήταν η τελευταία φορά όπου, με την ευκαιρία εκείνης της γιορτής, οι θεοί του Ολύμπου κάθισαν στο ίδιο τραπέζι με...

Author	Italo Calvino
ISBN	0156454890

One of the New York Times’s Ten Best Books of the Year: These traditional stories of Italy, retold by a literary master, are “a treasure” (Los Angeles Times).
 
Filled with kings and peasants, saints and ogres—as well as some quite extraordinary plants and animals—these two...

Author	Carlo Levi
ISBN	0374530092

It was to Lucania, a desolate land in southern Italy, that Carlo Levi—a doctor, painter, philosopher, and man of letters—was confined as a political prisoner because of his opposition to Italy's Fascist government at the start of the Ethiopian war in 1935. While there, Levi reflected on the harsh...

Author	Luigi Pirandello
ISBN	1590171152

Mattia Pascal endures a life of drudgery in a provincial town. Then, providentially, he discovers that he has been declared dead. Realizing he has a chance to start over, to do it right this time, he moves to a new city, adopts a new name, and a new course of life—only to find that this new existence is as...

Author	Adriana Trigiani
ISBN	0061257095

The majestic and haunting beauty of the Italian Alps is the setting of the first meeting of Enza, a practical beauty, and Ciro, a strapping mountain boy, who meet as teenagers, despite growing up in villages just a few miles apart. At the turn of the last century, when Ciro catches the local priest in a scandal,...

Author	Niccolò Ammaniti
ISBN	1400075637

In this immensely powerful, lyrical and skillfully narrated novel, set in southern Italy, nine year-old Michele discovers a secret so momentous, so terrible, that he daren’t tell anyone about it. Read an exclusive excerpt at BookBrowse today.

The hottest summer of the twentieth century....

Author	Italo Calvino
ISBN	0156226006

Italo Calvino's extraordinary imagination and intelligence combine here in an enchanting series of stories about the evolution of the universe. He makes his characters out of mathematical formulae and simple cellular structures. They disport themselves among galaxies, experience the solidification...

Author	Giovannino Guareschi
ISBN	0848824326

This tragicomical stories, often politically or socially charged, mostly situated in a fictional village on the Po called Boscaccio, in the period immediately after World War II, paint a clear picture of the post-war Italy. In this period the Italian Communist Party is very strong, but the Second...

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	Tim Parks
ISBN	0802140343

In this deliciously seductive account of an Italian neighborhood with a statue of the Virgin at one end of the street, a derelict bottle factory at the other, and a wealth of exotic flora and fauna in between, acclaimed novelist Tim Parks celebrates ten years of living with his wife, Rita, in Verona, Italy....

Author	Italo Calvino
ISBN	0156572044

Calvino has been on my radar for a long time, and I think I made a good choice in picking Marcovaldo for a first try. This is a small book, but it has a big heart. The stories are set in the poverty ridden early 1950's and follow up to the relative abundance of the 1960's. The immediate connections that spring...

Author	Stendhal
ISBN	0679783180

Richard Howard's exuberant and definitive rendition of Stendhal's stirring tale has brought about the rediscovery of this classic by modern readers. Stendhal narrates a young aristocrat's adventures in Napoleon's army and in the court of Parma, illuminating in the process the whole cloth of European...

Author	Primo Levi
ISBN	0684826801

The true and harrowing account of Primo Levi’s experience at the German concentration camp of Auschwitz and his miraculous survival; hailed by The Times Literary Supplement as a “true work of art, this edition includes an exclusive conversation between the author and Philip Roth.

In...

Author	Henryk Sienkiewicz
ISBN	0781805503

Rome during the reign of Nero was a glorious place for the emperor and his court; there were grand feasts, tournaments for poets, and exciting games and circuses filling the days and nights. The pageantry and pretentious displays of excess were sufficient to cloy the senses of participants as well as...

Author	Dino Buzzati
ISBN	1567923046

Often likened to Kafka's The Castle, The Tartar Steppe is both a scathing critique of military life and a meditation on the human thirst for glory. It tells of young Giovanni Drogo, who is posted to a distant fort overlooking the vast Tartar steppe. Although not intending to stay, Giovanni suddenly finds...

Author	Donna Leon
ISBN	0142004960

Donna Leon's growing American fan base is hungry for more of the books from her internationally bestselling series featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti. Now in what many consider one of the finest in the series, Venice braces for the onslaught of "acqua alta"-the rising waters from torrential rain....

Author	Rosalind Laker
ISBN	0307352560

Enduring friendships and long-held vendettas come alive against the splendor and decadence of eighteenth-century Venice.

In 1775 Venice–known to outsiders as “the brothel of Europe”–the tradition of mask-wearing has allowed adultery and debauchery to flourish. But Marietta...

Author

Luigi Pirandello

Pirandello (1867-1936) is the founding architect of twentieth-century drama, brilliantly innovatory in his forms and themes, and in the combined energy, imagination and visual colours of his theatre.This volume of plays, translated from the Italian by Mark Musa, opens with Six Characters in Search...

Author	William Shakespeare
ISBN	0671722921

Literally years after people began suggesting that I do this, I finally got around to reading the damn play. So in the words of Bette Davis: fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night. Because here's

TITUS ANDRONICUS, ABRIDGED:

TITUS: Man, it's great to be me! I'm an awesome...

Author	Italo Svevo
ISBN	0375727760

Long hailed as a seminal work of modernism in the tradition of Joyce and Kafka, and now available in a supple new English translation, Italo Svevo’s charming and splendidly idiosyncratic novel conducts readers deep into one hilariously hyperactive and endlessly self-deluding mind. The mind in...

Author	Elizabeth Lev
ISBN	0151012997

The astonishing life of a long-misunderstood Renaissance virago.Wife, mother, leader, warrior. Caterina Riario Sforza was one of the most prominent women in Renaissance Italy—and one of the most vilified. In this glittering biography, Elizabeth Lev reexamines her extraordinary life and accomplishments.Raised...

Author	Anne Rice
ISBN	0345396936

Anne Rice brings to life the exquisite and otherworldly society of the eighteenth-century castrati, the delicate and alluring male sopranos whose graceful bodies and glorious voices brought them the adulation of the royal courts and grand opera houses of Europe, men who lived as idols, concealing...

Author	Mary Taylor Simeti
ISBN	0679764143

My family spent a month in Sicily this past April. It was a much-needed vacation to one of my childhood homes, and it was a vacation full of good times, great food, and wonderful wine. While we there, my husband and I read several books concerning Sicily, and On Persephone's Island was my favorite. Simeti...

Author	Italo Calvino
ISBN	0060956585

Italo Calvino was only twenty-three when he first published this bold and imaginative novel. It tells the story of Pin, a cobbler's apprentice in a town on the Ligurian coast during World War II. He lives with his sister, a prostitute, and spends as much time as he can at a seedy bar where he amuses the adult...

Author

Frances Mayes

Frances Mayes invites us back for a delightful new season of friendship, festivity, and food there and throughout Italy.

Frances Mayes, whose enchanting #1 New York Times bestseller Under the Tuscan Sun made the world fall in love with Tuscany, invites us back for a delightful new season of...

Author	Ann Radcliffe
ISBN	0140437541

From the first moment Vincentio di Vivaldi, a young nobleman, sets eyes on the veiled figure of Ellena, he is captivated by her enigmatic beauty and grace. But his haughty and manipulative mother is against the match and enlists the help of her confessor to come between them. Schedoni, previously a leading...