Italy Books

Organized by seasons, Susan Simon's "Insalate" provides Italian salads for all meals, from the sublimely simple - melted gorgonzola poured over baby spinach leaves, or romaine and fennel salad, or tomato and mozzarella; to the simple and hearty - tuna and bean, bread salad, eggplant caponata. There are grilled salads with tomato and zucchini, fruit salads including mixed berry with blueberry sauce, grapefruit and carrot salad, grapefruit and avocado, orange salad with leeks and radicchio. She offers seven potato salads, including potato and green bean with pesto, potato and beet and a simple baked potato salad with sweet pepper and onion. There are only two pasta salads, one with eggplant, one with tomato and basil.

The emphasis is on fresh ingredients and the directions are simple, as is most preparation. Anyone who loves fresh vegetables and Italian flavors like olives and olive oil, capers, anchovies, tomatoes, basil, and parmesan will find the recipes and luscious color photos mouth watering.

This is a sensational little book full of delicious, inventive recipes. Great for summer, but the rest of the year is thoroughly seen to as well. Highly recommended.

We found the Malta Insideout City Guide to be very helpful to us for our recent short (4 day) visit to Malta. It provided highlights of things to see and do as well as helpful travel and lodging information all arranged in a useful manner. The maps were very helpful in making our way around the city and island. The size was very handy at the expense of the very small print.

I have traveled quite a bit and have used travel guides from many different companies, but I have just discovered the Insideout guides and I really like them. They are truly designed for use while in the area you are visiting, though they are also good for planning. The key to understanding these guides is to realize that they are full of features though very compact, and fit easily in a pocket or purse.

The Insideout guide to Malta has two unique popout maps, one of the island itself with a smaller map of St. Julian's Bay (which also includes Paceville, Is-Swieqi, and the road to San Gorg Lido and Saint George's Tower, the Ix-Xatt Ta' San Gorg;) the other popout map is of Valletta, Sliema, and Mdina, and has especially excellent depictions of historic landmarks such as various war memorials, the Maglio Gardens, Neptune's Courtyard, and the National Museum of Fine Arts. Inside the rear cover is a good (but small) map of Gozo and Comino (Ghawdex and Kemmuna) including such important features as the Pornskizillious Museum of Toys, the Folklore Museum, the Mgarr ix-Xini Tower, and the convenient heliport at Mgarr.

In total the book has 64 pages of information on Malta, all of which are well written and useful. Of course the interesting sights like the Blue Grotto, the Dingli Cliffs, and the amazing Hypogeum of Hal Saflieni (a huge 4,000 year old underground temple) are well represented, but this little guide also contains great information on restaurants, performing arts, sports, and retail shops, including information ranging from the popular Maltese clothing shop "Mango & Pull & Bear" which is known for excellent casual clothing at reasonable prices to the less well-known Ta' Xbiegi Craft Village, which, while housed in World War Two vintage Nissen huts, features beautiful lace, gold and silver filigree, and the ceramics for which Maltese artisans are so well known.

Adding to the appeal of this book is its clever binding. The spine of this book actually contains a small but useable magnetic compass to help with orientation on the ground, and a small pen which is very handy for taking notes (there is a spare page for notes near the rear of the book as well.) For useful and easily usable information at your fingertips, this is the one guide to Malta that any traveler should definitely take with them. I highly recommend this guidebook.

this book is a must read for those who wish to travel to Rome, and also makes a very interesting read in any case.
The book has several interesting chapters which detail the varied historical episodes in Romes history

I have been to Rome once before and thought I knew the city until I found this book. Most guidebooks only give a sentence or two about a site or a church, this book goes into much more detail, detail that is interesting and reads well. If you like history and want more background and historical 'storyline' about the places you are visiting then this book is for you.
If you want to know what the contorted womans' faces are around the altar in St. Peter's, get this book. If you want to know why a snake is biting a man's genitals in a fresco in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, get this book. If you want to know the details about how the Borghese Museum collection was assembled, get this book. Are the bones of St. Peter really in the Basilica? Get this book and find out. Details on Caligula, Nero, Borgia and more.
This book also outlines some secluded and quiet hotels (a rare find in Rome) though some were pricey and it also lists restaurants off the beaten path (hope your Italian is up to scratch for some places). Good listing for shopping too. The maps are ok and there is a list of suggested walks, but I like to wander around and get lost.
Not your normal travel guidebook, but I'm not a normal traveller.

This book was pUrchased because of my love for Tuscany...It provides excellent arm-chair travel for me...It is very readible and holds my interset and I would say others would enjoy it. It is a guide for actual travel but also a book that can be reAD WITH PLEASURE.

This is the third guide book I have purchased from Insight guides. One on Turkey, one on Alaska and now one of Tuscany. I find that they give a good thumbnail review of places, people and good shopping...etc. I will buy another if I travel to a place that they have listed..

I am a travel agent who sells luxury travel, mostly for Americans going
to foreign countries. I give the Insight Fleximaps to my clients as gifts before they depart the US. If you have a good, old-fashioned ballpoint pen around, you can circle the hotel location on the map as
"home". My only wish is that the map could be folded a bit smaller or more square. The other nice thing is that some of my clients go to Italy over and over, so they can save this map for future vacations or business trips.

When visiting Rome you will find that the city is a maze of narrow winding streets surrounded by high buildings. It is impossible to see more than one or two blocks in most places. Furthermore the names of the streets are not on signs but carved into stones on the sides of buildings, and not at regular intervals. Turn one or two corners and you will find yourself completly lost.
Furthermore many of the prime spots are in places that are best accessed on foot. The streets are too narrow for tour busses or cabs. If you plan on seeing Rome you will eventually find youself on foot, and you had better be prepared with a good map.
This map is well laid out with the streets printed in an easily readable fashion, despite the twists and turns of the streets themselves. It also has the major landmarks and the churches that are open to the public in seperate colors so they are easily found.
Finally after a week of carrying the map in my back pocket, and several unexpected rain showers, it was still as good as when I first purchased it, do to the lamination. In all this is a durible, well laid out map that is essential to the Roman visitor. Trust me, every street corner had at least one tourist checking their map to figure where they had been, where they were, and how would they get to their destination.

Rome is a very good city to walk around in. Most of the sights are within walking distance of each other and you can't walk more than a few blocks without coming across some ancient ruin or historic church. A map like this is a necessity because, as another reviewer noted, Rome is an easy city to get lost in. The streets often wind and curve, and it is easy to lose your bearings.

The Insight Map of Rome provides a very detailed map of a large area of the city within which you will find virtually all of the city's tourist sites. It also includes a map of the Rome subway system which is very easy to use: It is hard to get confused about it as there are just two subway lines.

I used this map on my recent visit to Rome and found it indispensable.

This is a great cookbook, filled with many delicious italian recipes. You can't go wrong with this one. It will be a part of my collection for many years to come. Love it!!!

What a great book; great reading and wonderful tasting foods. the ricotta cookies are to die for. The canoli and filling is like grandma's. The vegatarian Minestroni was easy and very flavorful. A great crock pot soup!

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.

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.