Italy Books

I'm reading this now, savouring it, allowing one story a day. The stories are gems, polished without feeling workshopped, elegant without seeming traditional, classics yet not stodgy. Spencer's understanding of the nuances of class are superb, and her settings are evocative, rich and compelling. I've read little Southern fiction and spent even less time below the Mason-Dixon line, but these stories still seem real to me, important, touching and relevant. Highly recommended.

Elizabeth Spencer's short stories are elegantly written and filled with moments of delicacy and insight. "Ship of Fools," written many years ago, retains a freshness in its youthful protagonist's perceptions, while her best-known work, "Light in the Piazza," takes the reader into an ethereal, long-lost but bewitching Italian setting. As piercing as her insights into human dynamics is her ability to capture a peculiar quality of light or the dreamy interior world of her many characters. Spencer expertly juxtaposes passages of apparently random stream-of-consciousness with exchanges between men and women that illustrate the kinds of tangled relationships we all make and encounter in daily life. There's never just surface events taking place in Spencer's fiction; much is constantly going on beneath the surface, which for me generates the kind of depth found only in the very best fiction. I strongly recommend her work to readers looking for prose that can be read and re-read, savored and enjoyed, many times over.

About a year ago I discovered the Book "Under The Tuscan Sun". I
loved that book and the books by Frances Mayes that followed.
Since than I had been looking for a new book about Tuscany.
Reading "Starting With Tuscany" was very different from "Under
The Tuscan Sun" but had the same wonderful characteristics. The
writing is beautiful, visual, and interesting. This story is
both funny and sad. The author is an architect/artist and the
book was like a very complicated/beautiful painting. Every chapter was captivating. I loved the time I spent with this author.

The best storytellers make you forget you're being told a story. Your conscious thoughts disappear, you are absorbed into the mental picture the author is describing, and it's as if you are the proverbial "fly on the wall," witnessing the events and even feeling as though you are a participant. Giovanna Peel wields such a powerful pen in her evocative, absorbing memoir, Starting With Tuscany, that the story achieves more than just that of a travelogue, where the reader vicariously visits a foreign or previously-untasted locale, and instead remarkably transforms the reader into a relative, a playmate, or a neighbor of Ms. Peel's childhood in Tuscany.

The book weaves a narrative of Ms. Peel's first trip back to her native Florence and the surrounding region known as Tuscany since she left it as a young woman. Ms. Peel, who describes herself as the black sheep of her large, prototypically colorful Tuscan family, had moved to Canada where lived in self-imposed exile for thirty years. She begins the trip home with a side trip to Provence with two friends, sort of a warm-up and re-acclimation to European ways before they continue on to Florence, Sienna, and other smaller towns in Tuscany. The trip to Provence fills in some of Ms. Peel's background and foreshadows the fears she has about returning to her native Italy. With her companions in tow, she is the apologetic European, trying to ease their path and explain away different customs and attitudes in order to save her friends discomfort and prevent cultural bias or confusion. In her own mind, she fails miserably, and indeed she seems to derive little pleasure from her sojourn in Provence.

Her transition to Italy fares no better, and Ms. Peel's discomfort increases as she mentally tries to apologize for the idiosyncratic ways of her fellow countrymen, while at the same time unwillingly resurrecting a grudging sense of national pride and even a reluctant tolerance or acceptance of the reasons for such ways. When her friends finally leave her alone in Italy, the introspective aspect of the narrative deepens and her enchanting reminiscences fill in the pages of her life. One learns that her father was a German Communist Jew who was persecuted by the Italian government and arrested with regularity. Her mother, with whom Ms. Peel was in constant conflict, had not enough love to go around after caring for her politically-dangerous and amorously-philandering husband and Ms. Peel's older sister. The tenement in which they lived was meager and sparse in furnishing, but lively with eccentric and deliciously strange neighbors, whom Ms. Peel describes in fascinating detail.

Formative experiences from Ms. Peel's life include her consignment to an orphanage as a young girl to protect her from her father's tuberculosis; the abduction of her father by German officials and his presumed death at their hands; and the arrival of a girl whom her father hired ostensibly as a servant but in reality as a concubine and the ensuing clash of wills between her mother and father. Even more influential to Ms. Peel's feelings of alienation were the constant reminders her mother rained down upon her that she was ugly, untruthful, strange, and unlovable. Herein lies the crux of Ms. Peel's pilgrimage back to her old stomping grounds. She has mixed emotions about her past and wonders whether coming to terms with her black sheep, ex-patriot status will bring her peace of mind or merely subsume her true identity.

Unless one is a celebrity, it takes a certain amount of hubris and ego to write an autobiography. Ms. Peel is an artist of some repute in Canada, but this is not the interesting part of her tale and she modestly dwells on it not at all. Nor is the narration of the events of her first trip back to Tuscany, which she seems to have enjoyed minimally, the reason she wrote this book. Rather, her justification for writing an autobiography is not only an interesting childhood set in an evocative locale, but also her ability to tell a damned good story. This is not to detract, however, from Ms. Peel's considerable ability to paint with words a landscape. But the emphasis is on the events of her childhood. Those expecting simply a description of regional customs may be disappointed, but readers who value a well-told story are in for an enjoyable read.

The most important book ever published on the most gifted philosopher of the Italian Renaissance has been given to us by Stephen A. Farmer. His superb introductory essay is followed by a masterful translation of Pico's most significant writings. How lucky we are to be the beneficiaries of this truly marvelous scholarship!

Syncretism in the West: Pico's 900 Theses (1486): The Evolution of Traditional Religious and Philosophical Systems With a Revised Text, English Translation, and Commentary by Stephen A. Farmer, Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola (MRTS: Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies) Born to the noble family of the Counts of Miran¬dola and Concordia near Modena, Pico lived on the edge of two distinct cultural periods, the former rooted in medieval scholasticism, the latter charac¬terized by the humanistic revival of classical thought. Pico's bright intellectualality and strong curiosity led him to study thoroughly both medieval and classical traditions in the most renowned cultural centers of learning of his time.. His multifaceted interests in all kinds of knowl¬edge, his peculiar life, as well as his precocious death constituted the basis for the rapid flourishing of his fame and for the spreading of his legendary biography also beyond Italian borders.
The myth of the "phoenix of his time", as the young Count was designated already by his con¬temporaries, has affected scholarly interpreta¬tions of Pico's intellectual speculation. Throughout the centuries, Pico's system of thought has been viewed as one of the earlier, more faithful, and most complete expressions of humanism. But his true originality actually becomes in Christianizing the Jewish kabbala and beginning a long line of Christian kabbalaistic speculation and magic.
Of scrupulous significance in this regard is the role played by hermetic theosophy in Pico's attempt to create an all-inclusive system of comprehension, deliberate to embrace and merge the most diverse philosophical and theological authorities. His plan of launching a concurrent syncretism (concordia) between a variety of religions and philosophical canons was unquestionably based upon scholarly fundamentals of his day.
Pico realized he had found in Jewish kabbala one of the major links between rational and religious systems of thought.
In 1486, while composing his famous 900 Theses, he resorted for the first time to a wide range of Jewish kabbalistic works, which had been trans¬lated on his request by the Jewish convert Flavius Mithridates (ca. 1450-1489). Pico plan was to submit and discuss all his Theses (which he had printed at the end of 1486) during a conference to be held in Rome early in 1487. A committee appointed by Pope Innocent VIII stopped Pico's plans, declaring that six of the the¬ses were suspect and condemning seven others. Most of the condemned Theses deal with Kabbalah. Pico immediately wrote his Apology in order to declare his innocence, but the result of this further attempt was that the Pope eventually denounced all the theses.
In one of the Conclusions condemned by the Church, Pico affirmed that 'no knowledge gives us more certainty about Christ's divinity than magic and Kabbalah'. In order to defend this ambiguous claim, Pico made an effort in his Apology to distin¬guish a good from an evil form of magic, as well as a positive from a negative Kabbalah. Accord¬ing to this distinction, the term Kabbalah was employed by the Jews to point out two distinct hidden disciplines, one dealing with a method for combining letters of the Hebrew alphabet (such a device, according to Pico, was not dissimilar from Ramon Llull's Ars), the second dealing with an investigation of the celestial beings dwelling above the sphere of the Moon; this second discipline was considered by the humanist as the higher form of natural magic. Thus, if investigation of supernal entities could be carried out by means of natural magic, this sort of kabbalistic magic would cer¬tainly allow the initiate to penetrate the mysteries of the divinity of Christ. In of the many ways his 900 Theses was a work that never received the explication it deserved and was planned, because it was aborted by the church, suspicious of syncretic systems as corrosive to dogma, and hence, to faith.
Farmer has come a long way in reconstructing the probable systems that Pico would have used to synthesize all knowledge as represented by these Theses arranged historically. Besides being the first full and only modern translation of the 900 Theses, using the special numbering system and a computer analysis of the language, Farmer makes a strong case for a much more original synthesis than has been conjectured by other modern scholars who have tended to look at the 900 Theses in a piecemeal fashion.
According to Farmer, `By the time of Pico's proposed the Vatican debate, the cumulative effects of over 2000 years of syncretistic processes had reached their most extreme levels ever. In the 900 Theses scores of earlier correlative principles of the warring subtraditions of Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew scholasticism, of Greek neo-Platonism and Aristotelianism, and of a wide range of esoteric traditions - Neo-pythagorean numerology, "Chaldean" and "Orphic" magic, pseudo-Hermetic mysticism and Pseudo-Mosaic Cabbalism - each a product of the repeated inbreeding of traditions of a still greater antiquity, emerged to give birth to the abstract concept of cosmological correspondents at the center of Pico' "new philosophy." The cumulative pressures of thousands of years of reconciling books in traditions of eventually lead to the elevation of the ultimate syncretic strategy as "the greatest of all" cosmic principles. Exegeses had completed its metamorphosis into cosmology; correspondents now lay at the very essence of reality: "whatever exists in all worlds is contained in each one"!'

This is a truly brilliant book. It highlights the fact that political and economic crises often produce similar results, specifically a centralization of state power. Some people may not like this book because it suggests similarities between Roosevelt's New Deal and Fascism. However, the point here is not to suggest Roosevelt was racist or antisemitic (a totally idiotic notion) but to focus on the much larger issue of the use of state power in a crisis. The book has important lessons for the future. The current world order is doing a very poor job is dealing with deadly threats like the global environmental crisis. In a new series of world crises there is likely to be a huge centralization of power. Albert Speer once observed that when fascism comes back, it will come back as anti-fascism. The larger issue here is totalitarianism and its potential role in the world future.

Mr. Schivelbusch, in this remarkably well researched and startling book draws parallels between the programs and leadership styles of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Franklin Roosevelt. He shows how many similarities there were to be found between each of these very different men. His purpose is not to demonize FDR, excuse the Nazis and Fascists or even to mitigate the failure of the average German and Italian to stand up their leaders. It is, rather, to provide a warning to the future that populism can shift from the benign to the monstrous. It is must reading for the general reader.

Having been a fan of Mr Schivelbusch's varied work for many years, I recently had the opportunity to dine with him at the home of friends of mine. I was interested to learn that he was a man of the Left, whose views were very different from mine. It is a tribute to his ability as a scholar that I never would have guessed his affiliations. He follows the truth where he finds it and never lets his own biases seep into his work.

He is a careful and diligent researcher. By way of example, T. Harry Williams' Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Huey Long merely casts doubt on those who attribute to Long the most famous of his quotes to the effect that "when Fascism comes to America, it will come in the guise of anti-Fascism." Williams does not make any serious attempt to track down the origin of the attribution, something you would expect from the author of a nearly 1000 page biography. In this short work, in a learned and careful footnote, Schivelbusch offers a variety of possible sources for this quote. THAT is careful research!

I highly recommend Three New Deals.

This book is really quite charming. It beautifully blends science, philosophy, history, and fiction into a format that is accessible to children and entertaining for adults. Highly recommended

Tibaldo and the Hole in the Calendar is a fictional story with a historically and scientifically correct setting. In 1582 Pope Gregory XIII proclaimed a reform of the calendar, including the omission of ten days--Oct. 5 through Oct. 14 of 1582-- to correct the inaccuracy of the Julian calendar. Tibaldo Bondi's twelfth birthday, on Oct. 10, 1582, would be omitted, to his distress. He imaginatively and courageously fought to recover his birthday, by asking help from his teachers and the governor of Bologna, and eventually from the Pope himself. The Pope was so amused (laughing for the first time in eight years!) by Tibaldo's daring and clever arguments that he issued a special decree restoring the celebration that would have been lost in 1582. This fictional decree is printed here in authentic papal Latin, but a translation is given. Tibaldo goes on to become a famous physician, pioneering in the use of the microscope and in preventive measures against the spread of infections. He also pioneers in the education of women, marrying a woman astronomer and ensuring that one of his daughters becomes a midwife, one a physician, and one an astronomer. As the background for the story much information is given about astronomy, medicine, midwifery, the history of the calendar, and the religious and political history of Italy. The book is printed in a Renaissance format and the beautiful etchings by Jonathan Shimony are in the style of Renaissance book illustration. The story and the factual background are accessible to children of age ten years or more but are also fascinating reading for adults. It is a particularly instructive and amusing book for a parent to read with a child. Tibaldo has been translated into French, Italian, German, Japanese, Chinese, Polish, and Greek, and is due to be translated into Spanish, Portuguese, and Hebrew. Tentative plans are underway to make a movie of it, to be set in Bologna, Italy.

I have read and used at least 10-15 guide books on Venice in 4 trips there and this is far and away the best to have with you in Venice. Others might be more interesting to read before you go, but if you need to carry only one there, this is definitely the most useful as you travel around town and need times, prices, locations, etc. It is also the most up-to-date on everything.

While studying in Edinburgh last year, I went to Venice for a week with a friend of mine last March. Armed with both the Lonely Planet Venice and Time Out: Venice guidebooks, we found the Time Out book to be wonderfully helpful. One of the best things about it was that it included (at least, last year's version did) a map of all the public toilets in Venice, which, let me tell you, is a very good thing. The book itself was informative, interesting, and well-written, the advice given was very sound, and, though accurate maps of Venice are notoriously hard to find, those in the Time Out guide were much more helpful than those in the Lonely Planet. I remember reading that the Lonely Planet guides were best for given areas and regions, but the Time Out guide were better for cities, and I have found this to be quite true.

I wrote this review two years ago for the amazon.co.uk website. I haven't been back to Venice since, but having used other Time Out guides in the interim (very high quality as long as they've been published rencently) and remembering how useful it was in Venice, I would still highly recommend this guide.

Timeless Cities is indeed a wonderful journey, a voyage across time and ideas. The author tells a poetic, scholarly and delightful story of five Italian cities and how they became meaningful and memorable places, remaining so to this day.

For those who have experienced the magical, transforming impact Rome, Florence, Venice, Siena and Pienza have on their visitors, David Mayernik unlocks the richly poetic ideas which are their very essence. An architect and traveler, his writing is filled with the passion of one who truly loves and understands the tradition of those great cities: the tradition of humanism.

For all for whom life is, above all, a cherished series of discoveries and experiences, Mayernik extends a masterful invitation to explore those places which stir our souls and which demonstrate the highest fulfillment of our collective potential for cultural and artistic achievement. He then challenges us to again seek to create cities "through which dance the Muses", cities which are "built Ideas suffused with cultural Memory". Accept his gracious invitation. It is a journey you will treasure.

Mr. Mayernik transports the reader to the glorious past of Rome, Venice, Florence, Siena, and Pienza; a past in which city builders sought to make their cities into reflections of the perfect heavenly City of God; a past in which every stone, every building, every piazza was an episode of the larger urban narrative that played itself for its citizens as a great "theatre of the mind."

Mr. Mayernik's writing allows us to view the urban mythologies of these places not as History, events frozen in by gone times and no longer capable of speaking to present generations, but as living lessons in city building; he invites his audience to learn the 'language' of these five cities so that we too can build memorable places.

Fans of Puccini's opera Tosca, myself included, will adore this in-depth, historically accurate study on Rome at the time of the opera's setting- Napoleonic War time Italy in the early 1800's. The author Susan Vandiver Nicassio is herself a retired soprano who sang the part of Tosca and knows not only the music but the historical background. This book is crammed with detailed information about Rome of this period. The sites mentioned in Tosca - the Church of San Andrea De La Valle, Palazzo Farnese and Castel San Angelo, are still standing in Rome today. This book takes us on a historic journey and delves into the political and cultural time set of the era.

Victorien Sardou was a late 19th century playwright who upon seeing Sarah Bernhardt performing in Paris theatres wrote La Tosca as a vehicle for her. The play is long and complex, a perfect 19th century example of what we now call a "well-made" play. It is virtually an epic. Tosca was a country girl, a shepherdess who was put into a convent for her wild ways and when the Pope heard her sing he cried and decided she should be an opera singer. She comes to Rome and makes it big, renowned for her voice as well as her beauty. Tosca's theatrical world is described in historical terms and in vivid precision. In Napoleon days, opera was still the biggest form of cultural artistic expression. In Italy, Spontini was writing such hits as La Vestale. Rossini was beginning to write his first major hits. Beethoven wrote his only opera Fidelio and in Germany, Webber was writing German fantasy operas. Tosca's world was one of service to high art but she would have suffured the stigma of being lusted after by several powerful and licentious men or become the mistress of a VIP and regarded as loose. In Tosca's case, she maintains a purity despite her rich lifestyle. She attends Church and "brings flowers and prayers to the Madonna". Mario Cavaradossi, in the play, is a pupil of Jacques Louis David and is not only an artist but a revolutionary. He believed, like many artistic idealists and intellectuals did- Beethoven included- that Napoleon's rise to power signaled a new reign of Enlightenment and social progress. This was before Napoleon crowned himself Emperor and proved to be a tyrant and the European intellegentsia's vision of a Utopia was shattered. Not only do we see the life of a singer and an artist, but the life of the likes of Baron Vitellio Scarpia, the dread Chief of Police, a man for whom "all Rome trembled." Scarpia exemplifies the devoted Royalist, a ruthless and corrupt member of the empowered class that men like Cavaradossi despised. Very well made book involving the real life of characters from the opera.

This book is wonderful! The author is a former opera singer who has sung the role of Tosca; now she is Associate Professor of History at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. In the book, she discusses the historical background of the opera and the play on which it was based, emphasizing the importance of the Church in Rome, and the conflict between Church and State. Then, in three chapters called "The Painter's Rome", "The Singer's Rome", and "The Policeman's Rome", she talks about Rome as each of the main characters of the opera would have seen it, and she also discusses real people who served as "models" for each character. Then she discusses each act of the opera, with a short chapter on the events that take place between Acts 1 and 2. She talks about earlier versions of the libretto, and things that were left out of the final version of the opera, as well as the arguments between Puccini and his librettists over certain parts of the opera. The author also discusses the differences between the play and the opera; in an appendix, she gives side-by-side summaries of the play and the opera. The book is also beautifully illustrated, and at the beginning of the book, there is a map that shows all the locations mentioned in the play.

The detail that the author goes into is incredible! She has figured out, for example, which operas were playing in the 1800 season in Rome, and which opera Tosca would have been singing in! And she really fills in all the "gaps" in the plot of the opera. I love the opera anyway, but when I listened to it again after reading this book, I felt I was listening to it with a completely new understanding.

Organized by course, the sumptuously illustrated "Trattoria" focuses on casual dishes as served in neighborhood restaurants throughout Italy.

Appetizers include crostini, bruschetta and grilled shrimp wrapped in prosciutto and zucchini. First courses include classics like lasagna Bolognese and Tuscan vegetable soup as well as an elegant, time-consuming eggplant and walnut ravioli in tomato-pesto sauce.

Main courses offer a similar range, from Neapolitan-style braised beef Braciole or duck with Vin Santo to swordfish rolls stuffed with shrimp. And for dessert - Tiramisu, plum cake or sweet gorgonzola with baked figs and honey. This balanced presentation is capped with accompanying photographs of the finished dishes which are absolutely irresistible. Also included is a chapter of basics - pasta making and stocks.

An excellent choice for a gift book for those who love authentic Italian Cooking, or even better for yourself. You would have to do months and months of research to gain the knowledge contained in this book. The pictures will make your mouth water, and the instructions will easliy guide you as you learn the secrets of the Tratorria. I highly recommend it. Purchase and enjoy this book, and maybe, if you're lucky, Mary Beth will send you her secret recipe for Lasagna.

This, and the other Tripbuilder books on Rome and Florence were a godsend for my first trip to Italy.

Why? The Tripbuilder provided key information that every traveler should have. How clever to have the detailed map rank and color-code areas of interest by category. Knowing weather conditions for various times of the year made it easy to pack the right gear.

I was especially grateful for useful tips on taking the public forms of transportation. Having this as a quick reference guide helped me overcome my trepidation over going out without a tour guide.

The walking tours, the vaporetta rides, tips about where to shop --- these were discoveries and forays into the "local scene" that made the trip so much more personal and enjoyable.

My friend recently went to Florence, so I shared with her my Tripbuilder to Florence. She loved it, and told me that the booklet was such a terrific help.

I am embarking on another European adventure. This time, to London, Paris and Amsterdam. I have already ordered my Tripbuilders. Can't wait!

For my first trip to Europe, I found the Tripbuilder books (Venice, Rome, Florence) to be outstanding pocket companions.

It is extremely clever to color-code and recommend areas of interest, and then to number and group them according to must-sees. Having the map allowed us to gauge the proximity (especially helpful when we're walking) of various attractions. The commentaries provided an insider's point of view and historical perspective about what we were seeing.

The other tips were excellent references as well, including what to pack depending on time of the year, where to go for information, exchange rates, etc. But what was especially helpful is information on how to get around using the public transportation. This helped us overcome our trepidation about taking the vaporetta, the subways, the buses, etc. Moving about the city just like the "locals" do gave us a totally different, and exciting, perspective.

We're getting ready to go to Paris, London and Amsterdam in 6 weeks. Although I looked at other quick reference books, I decided to stick with the Tripbuilder series as the only pocket reference books I will take.

Oh, did I mention I also liked the fact that the Tripbuilder booklets are the easiest things to take along? They fit very easily in a lady's purse, or a man's jacket pocket!