Italy Books

If you are looking for a first-hand, honest account of a little known area of Italy, you should get this book. This accounting of a group of young people's sojourn through the Marche area of Italy made me want to get on the first plane! No travel agent bull---- here. You will fall in love with the book and the region.

Great book! Fun and so funny! Will quickly inspire any reader to hop on a plane to Europe and explore the world the way these girls have

Reviewed by Emily Judah (age 13) for Reader Views (1/08)

"The Angel and the Ring" is a great book. I think that the "angel blog" in the book is really cool because it shows the author's vivid imagination on how angels can protect us on earth. Sigmund Brouwer is an awesome author. It shows so much in his books.

Young Brin is a 16-year-old half-gypsy, who lives with his thieving gypsy relatives. His gypsy mother and white father died of the plague, Black Death, when he was only a baby. Because Brin's mother married a "dirty" white man, the rest of the gypsies hated Brin because his mother betrayed her clan. His only possession is a ring, given to him by his father before he died. After his parents died his relatives decide to use Brin to pickpocket innocent people when the clan goes into towns. After pick-pocketing the people he is not even allowed to keep any money for himself, but is forced to give all the money back to the gypsy leader.

After one of his pick-pocketing adventures, he walks down a dark alley to return to the gypsy camp. He is almost through the alley when a hand grips his shoulder. He turns around to find a tall man whose face is hidden by dark shadows. Brin is surprised and a little wary when the man tells Brin he is just like his father. Brin is even more suspicious when the man asks to meet him at midnight that night. Brin doesn't outright accept but tells the man he will think about it, even though he has already made up his mind to meet him. Later that night Brin sneaks away from camp. When he reaches the man it is obvious that there has been some kind of battle. The man has blood on the side of his face, he can barely talk, but he manages to tell Brin to run. As Brin begins to leave he is approached by four dark-cloaked men, "The ring, gypsy boy" one of the men says in a deadly whisper.

The remainder of the book is the struggle between good and evil to posses the ring. This journey leaves Brin to discover the true meaning of the ring and to eventually discover the gift of God. The angel blog shows the reader how God and his guardian angels are always with us in our struggles. "The Angel and the Ring" is a simple read I would recommend to all youth.

I really loved the book! The angel that narrates the book is very funny. The action and the adventure were really awesome!
The book was so good that I couldn't put it down! The author Sigmund Brouwer, did an EXCELLENT job on the book.The story was great! THE ANGEL AND THE RING deserves better than five stars!

"In Valerio's hand, Anita Garibaldi emerges as the courageous but vulnerable woman from southern Brazil, whose singular and precious spirit was caught in the times. 'Anita Garibaldi' is a romance discovered in history's embrace. Valerio creates the Brazilian ethos in its emerald presence as the brillian nerve in Garibaldi's brave but short time. This biography has a texture like a Renoir film, broad and expansive, swimming alog in voluble seas."

--A. Weaver, Simmons College

"Anthony Valerio's genre-crossing biography provides unique insight into Anita Garibaldi's short, glorious life. Valerio writes with a novelist's dedication to character and an historian's dedication to the past."

Janet R. Jacobson, Director, Center for Research on Women, Barnard College

Absolutely stunning photographs. A gorgeous compilation of flawless homes.

This has to be one of the most beautiful collection of photographs compiled under one binding.
Absolutly worth adding to any serious library. Get lost within its lush images.

As a book that has been available in England for some time, I have sampled many of its delights. Don't be deceived by the simplicity of its recipes, for rarely has throwing several ingredients together tasted quite so delicious. Take the basic tomato sauce for example, who would have believed onions, tomatoes, basil and olive oil could have such flavour? And the Tiramisu is delicious, not unworthy of the finest dinner party yet so incredibly easy to make that a dessert for eight could be ready in less than half an hour. The book is made all the more unique by its contributors, for Antonio Carluccio has collected many recipes from Italian people like the cooking Count, Conte Carlo Maria Rocca. Whilst Carluccio remarks that "a cooking Count is not the kind of person you meet every day" this fact is not quite so astonishing as his monkfish, baked in layers of potato slices with fresh sage leaves and olive oil and parmesan, which is just divine. Inspiration is not hard to find in this book since Carluccio prefaces each of his recipes with a charming little anecdote. Whether he is describing the eccentricities of the wonderful people he meets, watching a recipe being made in a country kitchen, or picking local ingredients such as his `funghi hunt', Carluccio's passion for all that is Italy is infectious. When you finally taste the food that you have prepared, close your eyes and you might just believe that you are in a bustling trattoria in a hill town in Tuscany with a fine glass of Chianti, sampling traditional Italian cuisine at its best.

Antonio Carluccio is better known in UK than he is in America, largely through his very relaxed and charming TV series. He also has a restaurant in London's West End, and although not cheap even by British standards, it is worth every penny.

Carluccio's recipes are very simple, and somehow it is immediately clear how everything works. Every ingredient is there for a reason, and he attaches very little importance to superficial decoration of the dishes. The beauty lies in their gustatory quality.

Even if you are not the world's best cook, success rate with Carluccio's recipes is incredibly high, which is I suppose the ultimate praise for a cook-book.

Carlucio insists on good ingredients, and tries to show the true essence of the Italian cooking really is: food originating from the love of life and cooking tradition that is several millenia old.

Italian food needs no better ambassador than this cheerful man, formerly a wine merchant, now living in London. Buy this book, try a few recipes, and you will be hooked for life.

This is one of the best books about the Anzio landing I have ever read. It puts the reader right there on the front lines with the soldiers and what they were experiencing during that long siege. I have a special interest since my father served with the 45th Division from 1941 to their entry into Rome. This book is a keeper.

This is one of the best World War II books I have ever read. It is a combination of history text and memoir and will appeal to readers of each type. This book is well researched, and well documented and tells the story of Anzio that is both informative and engaging.

From 1347 to 1354, a Roman notary and budding antiquarian, Cola di Rienzo, led a revolution in Rome that riveted the attention of papal Avignon imperial Prague, and royal Naples, and for a short time restored the city to the center of what Giuseppe Toffanin once called "the century without Rome." Musto's rich and detailed treatment of Roman society, the fabric of the city, the frustrations of its absent popes, and its thuggish barons wonderfully illuminates 14th-century Rome, much as the late Robert Brentano's "Rome before Avignon" (CH, Oct. '74) illuminated 13th-century Rome. But the center is Cola - the antiquarian, Christian moralist of the buono stato, and apocalyptic visionary strongly influenced by spiritual Franciscan apocalypticism. Musto (co-director, History E-Book Project) deftly handles his often-elusive sources, wringing from them a far more reliable, but no less exciting, picture of the notary and his world than those of writers and artists from Petrarch to Richard Wagner. This splendid study of Cola's life and the forces he encountered, manipulated, and was destroyed by is as definitive, learned, and eloquent as one could hope for, and will long remain the master study of this complex figure and his times. Summing Up: Essential. All levels and collections. - E. Peters, University of Pennsylvania

[A] pleasure to read, for Musto has compiled a comprehensive history of the life of an intriguing man who with his words and deeds captivated the imagination not only of the Romans in his day, but also of popes and kings, a Holy Roman emperor, and above all one of Italy's finest poets. As an orator and statesman, Cola di Rienzo embodied the spirit of an age--a "new age" of politics, pursuing justice and peace, shot-through with aspirations and limitations; and his story truly makes for "an endlessly fascinating tale" Apocalypse in Rome constitutes the best new full-length manuscript (in English) in almost a century devoted to a serious historical study of the life and times of Cola di Rienzo. It is?based on "all the available sources" associated with "Rienzo, his Rome and its dealings with [the papacy in] Avignon." In addition, this book draws heavily upon recent studies of the spiritual and intellectual currents, social hopes and turmoil, and factious politics of medieval Rome and the Italian principalities in the mid-1300s. Its aim is, "to understand Cola di Rienzo in his own time and place and in the terms that he and his contemporaries saw him and his work for the revival of Rome.? Future scholars and students of Cola di Rienzo, Trecento Rome, and the Avignon Papacy in the time of Pope Clement VI will surely be indebted to Musto for his work.

There has been a good deal of scholarship in relation to this monument (The Ara Pacis Augustae), but few scholars have spent much time on the extensive vegetal friezes that are at eye-level on all four sides of the altar. Only a handful of scholars have written more extensively on this topic, and have put forth varying and interesting theories about their greater meaning in the context of the altar. David Castriota is one of the most thorough.
Castriota's major argument is that the friezes are an extremely important and integral part of the message of the monument as a whole. They represent through their vegetal imagery and the animals within this vegetal landscape the gods that best exemplified the pax Augustae and the restoration of the mos maiorum, the old Roman values and traditions on which Rome was thought to have been built.
In order for this message to convey the intended meaning to the majority of the Roman people, it had to be easily understandable. Both the educated and uneducated should have been able to quickly identify the basic concepts of the imagery it contained and understand what these images stood for without extensive study. Castriota looks first at the precedent for the vegetal friezes and what these earlier works meant to the people who commissioned them, and second, he discusses the widespread use of this type of decoration and how familiar the Roman people were with it.
Anyone who has an interest in Augustan history should read this book. The Ara Pacis was not just another piece of beautiful Augustan art. This monument stood as the epitome of the Augustan message of peace brought forth and solidified by Augustus; a peace that had never truly been seen in Roman history to that point.

This book provides the most exhaustive and conclusive research on the relationship of Dionysos and Apollo that I have come across. Many of the sources I examined on the subject are referenced here in Castriota's book, distilling their best elements and elaborating on them to bring out whole new dimensions. His examination of the friezes depicting Apollonian laurel and Dionysian ivy lends excellent evidence to the argument for the gods' complimentary relationship, rather than the foolish Nietzschian ideals of an antagonistic relationship between the two which had tainted so much modern scholarship. For those still stuck on Nietzsche's argument: read this book. I recommend it to anyone looking for a thorough examination of the Apollonian-Dionysian relationship. And all this, dear reader, is only one of the chapters. Pick this up now. Believe me, you won't regret it.

This book is a great introdcution to Venetian art of the Renaissance, through its views of the major artists of the time (the Bellinis, Titian, Pollaiuolo, Veronese, etc.), but it incorporates enough social, religious, and political history that one not only gets a more-well rounded view of the Venice of the Renaissance, but also is not bogged down in excessive stylistic analysis. This makes Brown's work a wonderful introduction to the Venetian novice, which many amateur art-historians caught up with Florence and Rome (myself included) tend to be.

This little paperback is packed with great information and great pictures. A must have for anyone interested in Renaissance Venice, it's well-organized and very easy to read.

Family of 4 killed in Ohio plane crash.

BUCYRUS, Ohio - A plane crashed in a field, killing four members of a Texas family and raining debris on a nearby apartment complex, authorities said.

No injuries were reported on the ground after the crash Sunday evening about 60 miles north of Columbus, state highway patrol Lt. Tony Bradshaw said.

Paul and Lillian Martin, of Austin, Texas, and their two children had been visiting relatives in Oklahoma and was flying to Searsmont, Maine, where the couple owned property, the highway patrol said. All four were killed on impact.

The crash site is about a mile from the Bucyrus-Crawford County Airport. But there was no sign of a distress call or any contact with air traffic control before the crash, Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Elizabeth Isham Cory said Monday.

Damage to the Indian Creek Apartments, the complex hit by debris, was minor, authorities said. Residents said they heard the plane's engine sputtering, followed by an explosion.

"When you're listening to something like that, you don't even think to take cover," resident Chris Beck said. "If it had gone a little further, it would have hit the apartments."

The cause of the crash was not immediately known. Light rain was reported in the area when the crash happened about 7:10 p.m. National Transportation Safety Board and FAA investigators were heading to the scene, Bradshaw said.

Authorities said Paul Martin was 49 and his wife 45, and identified their children as Kitanna, 10, and Shawn, 11. In Searsmont, Maine, town clerk Kathy Hoey said the Martins often spent time there during the summer. He was involved in marketing, and his wife was a marine archaeologist who wrote a book on Venetian ships, she said.

Rotund merchant ships. Sleek warships. Humble fishing boats and sturdy lighters. Pleasure craft and gondolas. The harbor of Medieval and Renaissance Venice thronged with watercraft. Ships and boats were unquestionably vital to the Venetian Maritime Republic, and her ships were of extreme importance historically. Venice, settled in the fifth century in the lagoons of the Adriatic Sea, was always a maritime nation. Three factors gave Venice advantages over other medieval trading city-states: the city's location, governmental policies, and the skills of her inhabitants. Nearly the entire population of Venice was involved in maritime trade in one way or another. Venice became a key trading agent between the European and Mediterranean world market and her citizens made a fortune. Many details as to the nature of their watercraft, however, have yet to be well understood. Three forms of evidence potentially fill in the void: archaeological remains of ships or boats, written documents concerning vessels, and artistic representations of watercraft. Remains of Venetian ships and boats are scant, and written records, rarely complete in their information. Excavations in the region have revealed only a few small boats, two merchant ships, and a galley, yet this limited sample of the ships and boats of Venice offers the base on which to build. A more accurate understanding of Venetian maritime history is achieved only through integrating all forms of evidence.

Pictorial documents constitute a unique corpus of data, invaluable information for anyone studying the history of ships and boats, yet these documents are rarely adequately studied. I had the pleasure of living and working in Venice with the goal of discovering and documenting maritime art from the region. Maritime themes prevail in the culture and legends important to the area. Ships and boats abound in Venetian mosaics, frescoes, paintings, sculptures, manuscript illuminations, technical treatises and graffiti. For example, the relics of St. Mark (who became patron saint and symbol of Venice) were "pirated" away from Alexandria, hidden from the Muslim customs officials in a basket of pork on board the ship. This story was frequently depicted in Venetian art, and these images show us what Venetians conceptualized when they thought of "a merchant ship". This book, with 158 illustrations, is full of interesting and beautiful maritime art, and offers intriguing details to ponder. The book appeals at one level to the layman interested in archaeology, ship history and art history, but has the substance (index, bibliography), detail and depth to satisfy the researcher.