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Reading Italy

Top 10 Reading Italy : The Divine Comedy, Invisible Cities, The Leopard, An Italian Education, Eat, Pray, Love, D.H. Lawrence and Italy: Twilight in Italy/Sea and Sardinia/Etruscan Places, Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture, I, Claudius, Much Ado About Nothing, The Enchantress of Florence

The Divine Comedy
AuthorDante Alighieri
ISBN0679433139
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...
Invisible Cities
AuthorItalo Calvino
ISBN0156453800
"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...
The Leopard
AuthorGiuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
ISBN0679731210
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...
An Italian Education
AuthorTim Parks
ISBN0380727609
Tim Parks' first bestseller, "Italian Neighbors," chronicled his initiation into Italian society and cultural life. Reviewers everywhere hailed it as a bravissimo performance. Now he turns to his children -- born and bred in Italy -- and their milieu in a small village near Verona. With the splendid...
Eat, Pray, Love
AuthorElizabeth Gilbert
ISBN0143038419
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...
D.H. Lawrence and Italy: Twilight in Italy/Sea and Sardinia/Etruscan Places
AuthorD.H. Lawrence
ISBN0141180307
Ovo sam (naravno) pročitao pre 18-dnevnog putovanja po Italiji. I nisam imao pojma ko je DH Lorens pre toga (napisao je Lady Chatterley's Lover, ne baš najbolja preporuka).

Početak, koji govori o njegovim nedeljama u okolini jezera Garda, je poprilično dosadan. Morao sam da ga preletim,...
Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture
AuthorRoss King
ISBN0142000159
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...
I, Claudius
AuthorRobert Graves
Into the 'autobiography' of Clau-Clau-Claudius, the pitiful stammerer who was destined to become Emperor in spite of himself, Graves packs the everlasting intrigues, the depravity, the bloody purges and mounting cruelty of the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, soon to culminate in the deified insanity...
Much Ado About Nothing
AuthorWilliam Shakespeare
ISBN0743482751
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...
The Enchantress of Florence
AuthorSalman Rushdie
ISBN0224061631
A tall, yellow-haired young European traveller calling himself 'Mogor dell'Amore', the Mughal of Love, arrives at the court of the real Grand Mughal, the Emperor Akbar, with a tale to tell that begins to obsess the whole imperial capital. The stranger claims to be the child of a lost Mughal princess,...
Italian Folktales
AuthorItalo Calvino
ISBN0156454890
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...
Voice of the Violin
AuthorAndrea Camilleri
ISBN0142004456
The Sicilian detective, Inspector Salvo Montalbano, is on the search for the killer of a young woman. Among the suspects are her aging husband, a famous doctor; a shy admirer (now disappeared) and her lover - an antiques dealer from Bologna. However, it is a mysterious, reclusive violinist who holds...
Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe
AuthorBill Bryson
ISBN0380713802
Bill Bryson's first travel book, The Lost Continent, was unanimously acclaimed as one of the funniest books in years. In Neither Here nor There he brings his unique brand of humour to bear on Europe as he shoulders his backpack, keeps a tight hold on his wallet, and journeys from Hammerfest, the northernmost...
On Persephone's Island: A Sicilian Journal
AuthorMary Taylor Simeti
ISBN0679764143
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...
Quo Vadis
AuthorHenryk Sienkiewicz
ISBN0781805503
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...
Italian Neighbors
AuthorTim Parks
ISBN0802140343
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....
Vita Nuova
AuthorDante Alighieri
ISBN0192839357
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...
A Thousand Days in Tuscany: A Bittersweet Adventure
AuthorMarlena de Blasi
ISBN0345481097
They had met and married on perilously short acquaintance, she an American chef and food writer, he a Venetian banker. Now they were taking another audacious leap, unstitching their ties with exquisite Venice to live in a roughly renovated stable in Tuscany.

Once again, it was love at first...
A Bell for Adano
AuthorJohn Hersey
ISBN0394756959
3.5 stars rounded up.

It’s 1943 and Victor Joppolo, an American Major, is assigned to oversee the town of Adano in occupied Italy. Joppolo passionately believes in the American system, and through his idealism—which reminded me a little bit of the movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington—he...
Memoirs of Hadrian
AuthorMarguerite Yourcenar
ISBN0374529264
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,...
The Scarlet City
AuthorHella S. Haasse
ISBN0897333721
In The Scarlet City, Hella Haasse takes us to 16th-century Italy, which is torn by savage violence of war and sinister intrigues for power.
The novel centers around Giovanni Borgia, a mysterious figure known in history as the infans Romanus, or child of Rome. Although he bears one of the most notorious...
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
AuthorGiorgio Bassani
ISBN1400044227
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...
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