Italy Books

Bondanella offers a superb overview of the Italian national cinema, and explains the central contribution of Italian auters and artists to this quintessentially 20th Century artform. With encyclopedic sweep, the reader is served bite-sized portions of every major Italian film in a series of full-length chapters. The narrative is crisp and well-paced. The morsels may be bite-sized, but in the end, the reader is treated to an enormous feast of gourmet cinema.

Organized in a roughly chronological framework, Bondanella takes us from the humble beginnings of cinema in the Italian peninsula through to the present day. The discussion of the Neorealist moment, for example, traces the artistic and social roots of the movement, and touches upon it's profound (and continuing) influence within Italy and around the world. The 3rd Edition revises some of the text, and updates the final chapters on the most recent developments in Italian filmmaking.

The discussion is organized most often as a series of capsules addressing nearly every major Italian film. The result is a combination between historical exposition and film encyclopedia. I haved repeatedly turned to Bondanella's book to gain a quick insight or two into a film I may be lucky enough to be able to rent, see in one of New York's innumerable film venues, or catch on cable. Professor Bondanella could have possibly done more at times to explain the context in which these films were made. The political and social backdrop of the Italian peninsula has been an important determinant of the artistic output of it's people. It is not that these details are ignored --- in fact they are very well represented at many points in the narrative, and much more detail in a volume as compact as this one would likely have undermined the project as a whole --- but the reader may need to consult other sources at times to gain a more contextualized understanding or to clear up a confusing point here and there.

But this criticism should be made with a caveat. Bondanella sets out to provide the reader with a coherent narrative of the breathtaking accomplishments in film art in Italy. He succeeds in that task brilliantly. The panorama of 20th Century Italian film presented is as awe-inspiring as the most idyllic Tuscan villa or the Alpine vistas of the Alto-Adige. Reader's wishing to gain an appreciation of the central importance of Italian cinema will not be disappointed.

Now in an expanded and fully updated third edition, Peter Bondanella's Italian Cinema From Neorealism To The Present continues to be the premier single volume reference to Italian films available to an English readership. From the silent movie era and the fascist period, through the various masters of neorealism, down to the present day, this comprehensive reference is an essential, core addition to any personal, professional, or academic film reference library. Of special interest are the select bibliography on the Italian Cinema, the information on locating Italian films on videocassette and DVD, and a comprehensive index.

I agree with most of the comments written by the previous reviewer. This anthology fills an obvious gap in the market which - if I can also indulge in a spot of publisher-bashing for a moment - is mainly caused by publishing companies not wanting to take risks with "minority cinema" projects. The broad scope of this volume is particularly impressive, making it an ideal first port of call for people conducting research into genres ranging from mafia movies to horror. The different theoretical approaches used with regard to each director/genre are also very effective. Certainly worth buying if you're into Italian cinema.

How satisfying to read a publication that focuses on the last couple of decades of Italian cinema, without dredging up the 'glory days' of Fellini, Rossellini and co. The fact is that some real gems have emerged from Italian film-makers in the past few years, most obviously "Nuovo Cinema Paradiso" which rightly receives a considerable degree of (innovative) analysis in one of the chapters in this book. Moretti's "The Son's Room" is another memorable film which springs to mind, and this receives a fascinating and generally convincing psychological dissection early on in the "New Auteurs" section of the volume. Another of the book's strengths is the way it spotlights lesser known (not for much longer) directors with a strong regional identity, such as Giuseppe Gaudino and Daniele Cipri/Franco Maresco. A very thoughtful and methodical piece of research; it would have benefitted from a few photos, but no doubt the copyright/publisher's surcharges would have been exorbitant. Congratulations to the editor and contributors on a splendid piece of work.

Intersting homes are featured in this book with some unpredictable decorating. It has great photography of the homes as well as fantastic views on some of the featured properties. I also recommend French Country Living by the same author.

The seller says I will receive a credit, and allowed me to return the book. It is a nice book, not exceptional; good addition to references.

I enjoyed every page of this book. When I finished it, I wanted to know more, not only about festivals, food and other traditions but about the author. I felt like I should know her, like we should be friends.

The recipes are well research and well written, and include notations on the difficulty of preparation, making it a tool for novices and experts alike. When I finished reading this book I wanted to cook my way through it.

This one I will keep in the kitchen.

This review is written from the perspective of a serious home cook that has been studying cooking for 25 years, and concentrating on Italian cooking for the last ten.

This book is a wonderful addition to any Italian cookbook library. The author does a magnificent job of painting a picture of the Italian festival culture. I was surprised by the emphasis on food and festivals during my first trip to Italy. It now seems second nature to me. If you have ever been fortunate enough to eat any of the wonderful festival food in Italy you know what a gift this book is to the culinary community.

The recipe for baked Gnocchi with Asparagus, Taleggio and Asiago is simply amazing. If you have either a Wegmans or Whole Foods in your area you should have a source for Taleggio. It is worth the effort to find this specialty cheese; it is a fantastic product that is almost addicting. The Sauteed Chicken with Poached Shrimp and Fried Eggs is also to die for. I have been pleased with every dish from this book. Some are more work than others, but all worth the effort.

The author also does a nice job of explaining the regional aspects of the dishes. This book is part cookbook, and part regional cooking history. I highly recommend this book for anyone that is seriously interested in Italian cooking.

She is one of the most incredibly sophisticated, sensitive, erudite human beings I have ever made connection with. If she writes it, you must read it. ....

Landy has done it again! "Italian Film" continues with remarkable clarity her dissection of Italian film culture since "Fascism in Film." Princeton: Princeton University Press; 1986. The book steps outside traditional terrains of national cinema to explore questions of landscape, history, femininity, masculinity, stardom, and relations between film and television. Neorealism finally gets its due in Landy's innovative treatment. Highly recommended for Summer reading.

I don't actually own this book, but I've borrowed it from my school library a couple times now. I didn't know a whole lot about the Futurist's movement before checking it out, other then that it existed and the basic premise of it.

I was browsing around one semester looking for interesting poetry, partly because I'm an English major, but mostly because I enjoy reading it. This came up in one of my searches and I tried it out, and was extremely glad that I did. It was some of the most original poetry I've read in a while, taking some ideas I've only seen a little of and expanding them greatly, like image poetry, creating a picture out of words, and some poetry that took the imagist idea of showing rather then saying to some pretty extreme levels. I don't have the book in front of me right now, but in trying to draw connections, some of the prose poetry reminds me a lot of Bob Dylan's Book Tarantula and some of his songs. I'm not sure if that is a wholly accurate connection, but the way of throwing a lot of words, with strange connections and lots of nouns seems to happen in both futurist works and Dylan.

To get away from that connection though, that is definitely not the only type of poetry in this book. There are more standard line and stanza break poetry, if you know Italian you can probably find rhyme as well with the original Italian version prints along with the English translation. The translation quality seems to be very well done as well, I can't read Italian so I can't comment on if the meaning was preserved through translation, but the poems read well and don't have the stiff feel of a word for word translation.

The futurist movement, from the little I know about it, was considered controversial after WWII because they supported the Fascist government that formed in Italy, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt on that, firstly because they are poets and likely weren't looking into what the government really meant beyond supporting industrialization, and secondly, which supports the first as well, I don't recall any poems that glorified Fascism. I'm sure that there were some, and it is possible that the ones written supporting fascism were omitted from this book, but if a poet writes political pieces, and is actively praising a government, then it usually touches all of his work in some way, and I don't recall that in what I read. I'm sure you can find it if you look for it, and it might of been obvious in a few of the poems, but I don't recall any poems that scream praise for it. I know this is going off of memory, but I did read through each poem at least once, and pieced through it again several times after that, rereading most poems two or three times if not more.

I'm writing this mainly because I intent to borrow the book again, and eventually purchase a copy of my own, because it feels worth it to own a copy of this.

Also, in rereading I realized I miss one very important thing, the Futurist movement glorified industry, at least most of the poetry in this book does. It doesn't go at it by saying industrialization is what the world needs, but does it through image choices and what not. For example, going from memory, a poem title that expressed this very well was "Ode to Reinforced Concrete." As a whole though, the book doesn't really focus on industry as we think of it sometimes, like the heavy industry, factories mass producing things and such, although that is touched on favorably, but sometimes it is just looking favorably at electric lights, or even love poems and such. Rather then comparing things to nature or describing them through nature, however, they use industry and modernization.

So in short, it is a very different book of poetry, with writers that had a very strong passion for what they were writing about, and mostly got that feeling across in my opinion, using some fascinating structures to do it. If you love poetry and want to try something that isn't as well known, definitely try this book.

With great pleasure, I discovered such a complete book of Futurist Poetry. I appreciate the effort it went into compiling and carefully analyzing such a great and often bypassed period in Literary History. The Futurist were a major force and precursers to so many movements which came later that recieve more recognition. The introduction to this book and the essays are excellent pieces of writing which attempt to set the "record" straight. I recommend this book to all interested in the history of a great artistic movement which embraced all aspects of modern life. The Futurists were the avant-garde creating major changes in all aspects of life. This book finally shows their extensive works in poetry and places them in the proper light. It is refreshing to see Toronto Italian Studies Program take a major step in placing the Futurist in their appropriate place in History.

This is a wonderful book. The recipes are clearly written and easy to follow. Included are little pictures of all the ingredients - a help to us visual people dealing with unfamiliar ingredients. I will be giving this on as a gift!

On every page of every recipe you receive detailed and very throrough illustrations. I can't begin to tell you how useful this book is... get it!

If these delectable guides' plentiful pix don't get you drooling to explore, you need to get your salivary glands checked. The text is also noteworthy. (NY Daily News)

One of the best travel book series, with attention to detail, plus numerous color photographs and fine maps. Lots of instructions regarding practical travel matters. (Travel Books Review)

This is one of my old standards-- in other words, an all-time favorite. It's got great, simple recipes. The roasted vegetable recipe is outstanding. If you need pictures, this book is not for you, but use your imagination-- It's worth it!

I have almost 100 cookbooks. This is one of my favorites! Wonderful recipes that are simple to make yet loaded with authentic Italian flavoring.

Noa Steimatsky (associate professor of film studies and art history, Yale University) presents Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema, a thoughtful examination of how fascism and World War II forever changed Italy, as reflected through the works of four Italian filmmakers. From the documentary work of Michelangelo Antonioni on the River Po to the creations of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roberto Rossellini, and Luchino Visconti, Italian Locations is fraught with works that defined a sense of place - a place transformed and reconstructed in the wake of destruction. A handful of black-and-white photographs illustrate this thoughtful analysis, especially recommended for college library shelves and students of historical Italian cinema.

Steimatsky describes images and the tone in which they are pictured of the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1966 film "The Earth as Seen From the Moon" as "reconstruct[ing] the ramshackle, marginal world, seeing its humility as grandeur, its muteness as eloquence, its tragic-comedic resourcefulness as a 'desperate vitality'." Such circumstances and characteristics applied to large sectors of Italian society in the post-World War II decades. Steimatsky's timeframe for the postwar cinema stretches to about the latter 1960s. As with the foregoing comments on aspects of Pasolini's films, the author does not basically engage in interpretation (which often becomes overwrought or fanciful with many critics) nor in explanation (which can become didactic or wallow in the elementary). Instead, her style is basically explication, or clarification for properly orienting the reader as a premise for moving on to other matters regarding the subject at hand.

Steimatsky, who teaches film studies at Yale, considers the study of film as a part of cultural studies. In so doing, the author regards Italian film as having a major role in restoring and in so doing reinventing to considerable degree Italian society after its decades of Fascism under Mussolini and alliance with Hitler and the society's devastation in World War II. This is a large claim going beyond the perspective of many critics, film historians, and such of expounding how film can represent situations or issues; make impressions on masses of viewers; and stir imagination. These and more inhere in this author's appreciation of the Italian film. Notwithstanding the novelty and even possible hyperbole of the author's regard of Italian film, one agrees with it. Film in Italian culture is seen to have had such a role considering the weakness of institutions such as government and the military in Italian society.

Taking the top directors of Rossellini, Visconti, and Antonioni with Pasolini, Steimatsky devotes a chapter to each; in which she focuses on each director's primary theme or distinctive style. Antonioni's films, for example, are characterized by their display of modernism. Rossellini depicted "corpse-cities" where children and adults and sometimes foreigners tried to live a normal life in a pre- or post-civilizational condition while also trying to comprehend the enormity of the changes they face symbolized by the destruction of buildings, familiar places, etc.

It is when Steimatsky departs from her spare identifications of elements of a scene that the critique opens into the area of cultural studies around theme of the renewal of post-War Italian society. The author's insights and formulations range from the sociological to the religious to the psychological. In discussing the "Altered Terrain" created by the director Antonioni's camerawork and varied subjects, the author sees "[b]etween quotidian detail and a movement of emptying-out of the landscapes, fragments of river life, less-than-episodes, and unpursued plot clues traverse...the documentary body" of one of his films. Cinematic aspects, images, and subjects of Pasolini's films present an "aesthetic system [which] draws on the potency of the devotional image, whose reverential archaism also carries a realist claim."

This is film study at its most engaging, stimulating, and informative.