Italy Books

The 'Vita Nuova' is more than anything else a prelude to 'The Divine Comedy'. The Beatrice Dante falls in love with and longs for is on the one hand a figure unattainable, the love- goddess of courtly love. On the other hand she is to become the very essence of the spiritual and to guide Dante later through the Paradiso of the Comedy. The real figure and her life who he falls in love with truly is transformed in myth and mind to a kind of image and essence of Divine Beauty.
As with Petrarch and his Laura the love Dante writes of ' La Vita Nuova' does not somehow strike me and move me in the deepest way, and seems somehow too literary and artificial. Lines of love of Rilke and Kafka sound more authentic to me, but perhaps this is because I am a poor reader and no medievalist.
In any case this is a small classic which is prelude to a far greater one. And the real Beatrice is a small figure beside the mythic one Dante will transform into a literary immortal.

Genuine romance and passion is missing from most books, either fiction or nonfiction, and I don't think I've ever come across both in such quantity as there is in "La Vita Nuova" (translation: The New Life), the unsung masterpiece of poet Dante Alighieri (who wrote the classic Divina Comedia).

It is a series of poems centering around the life-changing love of Dante for a young woman named Beatrice. The two first met when they were young children, of about eight. Dante instantly fell in love with her, but didn't really interact with her for several years. Over the years, Dante's almost supernatural love only increased in intensity, and he poured out his feelings (grief, adoration, fear) into several poems and sonnets. During an illness, he has a vision about mortality, himself, and his beloved Beatrice ("One day, inevitably, even your most gracious Beatrice must die"). Beatrice died at the age of twenty-four, and Dante committed himself to the memory of his muse.

I have never in my life read a book overflowing with such incredible love and passion as "La Vita Nuova"; it's probably the most romantic book I have ever seen. It's only a little over a hundred pages long, but it's a truly unique love story. Dante and Beatrice were never romantically involved. In fact, both of them married other people.

But Dante's love for Beatrice shows itself to be more than infatuation or crush, because it never wanes -- in fact, it grows even stronger, including Love manifested as a nobleman in one of Dante's dreams. There is no element of physicality to the passion in "La Vita Nuova"; Dante talks about how beautiful Beatrice is, but that's only a sidenote. (We don't hear of any real details about her) And Dante's grief-stricken state when Beatrice dies (of what, we're never told) leads him to deep changes in his soul, and eventually peace. (And though Beatrice died, because of Dante's love for her and her placement in the "Comedia," she has achieved a kind of immortality)

One of the noticeable things about this book is that whenever something significant happens to Dante (good, bad, or neither), he immediately writes a poem about it. Some readers may be tempted to skip over the carefully constructed poems, but they shouldn't. Even if these intrude on the story, they show what Dante was feeling more clearly than his prose.

It's impossible to read this book and come out of it jaded about love or true passion. Not the sort of stuff in pulp romance novels, but love and passion that come straight from the heart and soul, in a unique and unusual love story. Every true romantic should read this book.

This is a wonderful book from many perspectives.
1st, there's the recipes. Easy, fun, and essential Italian fare.
2nd, there's history and stories.

You might ask why have narratives and stories in a cookbook. Well, as any Italians reading this will attest, Italian culture is more than just eating. Eating is a celebration, tied closely with family, culture, and history. You cannot separate one from the other. The story on the history of bruchetta is as important as the recipe itself.

This book combines both aspects as is wonderful way for 2nd and 3rd generation Italian-Americans to appreciate and understand their roots.

Ciao!

This is a terrific cookbook. Every recipe I have tried has been fantastic. Last night, I threw a dinner party and decided to add a soup to the menu. I was a little nervous because I hadn't tried it out before serving it to guests, but (just like every other recipe in this cookbook) it turned out to be fantastic. One thing to be aware of, however: While the recipes are fantastic, the directions are not always clear or complete. This cookbook is probably best suited to cooks that already have some experience in the kitchen.

Beautifully written, beautifully illustrated, and filled with detailed historical information. This book is a real find!

In my opinion this is a classic that fell through the cracks. I can't fathom how this book went out of print. It isn't possible to read Mein Kampf or a number of other books, inluding art, without reading Lives of the Courtesans for any kind of insight.

The price is high. I found a copy for about $60. It takes a little search.

*I recommend the Mein Kampf, 1943, By Houghton Mifflin Company if a person is going to read Adolf Hitler.

Rome, the eternal city, capital of Italy!

We all have images of Rome in our heads, whether created by personal visits or simply by what history has taught us about that city. In the end, Rome impresses even the most stubborn of people and this book brings Rome to your reach in a unique and lovely way.

The city is often a place of contradictions and confusion, but in Rome things flow easily from one sphere to the next. The soft writings which richly engages the reader into aspects of Roman culture, architecture, ambiance, and general lifestyles is truly impressive. This city comes to life in its most sophisticated way, it becomes a city that is being unrolled in a personal, almost private manner. Few books are able to portray a city in such a personal way, and few cities lend themselves to such protrayal.

However, Living in Rome does just that and more. It's a wonderful book of a wonderful city for wonderful people from around the world.

Living In Rome is an informative and visual celebratory tour showcasing the beauty and charms of Rome as well as some of the most unique treasures its has to offer. Included are introductions to Rome's lush gardens, gleaming family palaces, colorful markets, architecture, art, artisans and artists. Living In Rome takes the reader on a tour of intimate museums and off-the-beaten-path restaurants not typically included in conventional guidebooks. The cultural background of the structural and visual qualities of this remarkable place is enhanced for the reader with valuable resource information on hotels, cafes, and other points of interest. Whether an arm-chair traveler or on-site visitor, Living In Rome will prove a most remarkable and rewarding reading experience.

I bought this for my wife, after visiting Luca, in Tuscany! This book captures the memories! Excellent book!

A very beautiful and detailed book. A place to think about living out the golden years there. Becoming part of the local living.

I have been cooking and collecting cookbooks for fifteen years, and this is one of the most interesting and practical books I own. Anyone who cooks for parties must know how handy it is to have a platter ready for guests...something good for your friends, just as they come in. Can anything be better? This book has dozens of excellent recipes. I can't say I have made them all (or would even try!) but I have made many, and the ones I won't try lay temptingly in the future.

This is a good book!

Helena Chamber

I first heard about this book through another chef that once attended a cooking course with Ms De Medici in Italy. It is a hard to find book and one day I found it on the Amazon Marketplace and ordered it.

The book is all about Antipasti, and it starts with a chapter about the history of Antipasti illustrated with beautiful pictures of old portraits and of an italian market. The next two chapters are about Types of Antipasti and the Antipasto Pantry, where the author carefully explains the different ingredients utilized in this kind of foods.

The recipes are organized in Finger Food, Fork Food, and Preserves and Basics - in this cookbook you will find many recipes for Bruschetta, Crostini, Tartine, Bocconcini (little bites), Grissini (breadsticks), Foccace, Torte, Frittate (italian omelettes), carpaccio, salads, antipasti with fish, chicken, cheese, vegetables, and marinated foods.

I love this book. Every chapter has an introduction where she explains about the dishes, their names, and their history. It contains beautiful photos both ancient and modern. I recommend "Antipasti" to anyone that collects cookbooks and to anyone that loves real Italian Food.

Marina Warner's multiple award winning "Lost Father" is nothing less than a minor classic. Beautifully romantic and lyrical in style and content, it recalls one of those magical realism tinged three generation family sagas so typical of Latin novelists of today. The narrator is Anna, daughter of Fantina and grandaughter of second generation patriach Davide Pittagora of Rupe, Italy. Once married to but now divorced from an Englishman, Anna lives in London but undertakes a personal project of tracing and writing her family's history by interviewing her own mother. Piecing together bits and pieces fitfully remembered and sometimes imagined by Fantina (Davide's youngest daughter), Anna's story takes us from the Pittagoras' hometown of Rupe, then briefly to their new immigrant home in New York before their final return to Italy in the 1920s. It is a colourful story, filled with memories of love, friendship, loyalty and honour but also treachery and deceipt which tainted the unrequited love affair of Rosa and her brother Davide's best friend Tommasso, and spawned the mythological duel fought between Davide and Tommasso in defence of Rosa's honour. All this is told in grandiosely sweeping style against a backdrop of political upheaval as Italy enters its Fascist period under an unnamed "Leader" with ambitions to dominate the world. The flow of words from Warner's pen is unmatched in the incandescent beauty it produces. "Lost Father" positively shimmers. Jumbled up, its poetic and dreamy sequences resemble fragments snatched from the recesses of fading memory. It is a tour de force and should not be allowed to languish on old bookshelves. Go buy yourself a copy and read it.

Marina Warner is always interesting and worth reading, but for those of us who have lost a father, especially early in life, THIS book will hold a special fascination.

It is really about the quest for identity in individuals and in families, the difficulties of this challenge which confronts all of us, and the ways in which these difficulties are enhanced by the absence of a male authority figure who is, say, taken by death, before we can define ourselves in opposition to or in reaction against him.

For a young woman without a father, the task is to enter adulthood unescorted, without a test of her feminine power to charm; for a young man in that situation, it is to define himself without an Oedipal struggle or test of courage and manhood that involves the defeat -- if not literally the "killing," as Freud alleged by way of the Greek tragedy -- of the older "self."

Myth and the dreaming faculty are shown in this work to be essential to human beings, who most genuinely and meaningfully "live" only in the stories they construct all the time. We are dreaming creatures, symbol-making animals, and our most powerful symbols eventually define us.

Like Hamlet, whose words to his father's ghost are quoted in the title of this review, we aim to please most those fathers who are absent forever -- and whom we are, therefore, least likely to succeed in pleasing.

Read this book.

I was pleased to see that the redoubtable Ross King (of Brunelleschi's Dome fame) was recruited for this book. For readers unfamiliar with the "Eminent Lives" series, the idea is to pair distinguished authors with interesting subjects, the result being "short biographies perfect for an age short on time."

How very 21st century.

King does an excellent job of putting Niccolo Machiavelli's life and times into perspective. Machiavelli was much more of a man of action than I had realized; he interspersed his peripatetic diplomacy for Florence with an obsession with raising and training a citizen militia. And Machiavelli was hardly the black-hearted villain so often characterized. His greatest character fault may have been obsequiousness, as epitomized by his dedicating The Prince to Lorenzo Medici (a syphilitic lout who apparently never read the book at all.)

If I had any cavil about Ross King's book, it is that The Prince is not analyzed in the kind of detail that I hoped it would be. (One supposes a short biography designed for an age short on time has its limitations.) I intend to now follow the example of rapper Tupac Shakur, who read The Prince while imprisoned in 1995, and subsequently gave himself the moniker "Makaveli." (How much cooler than "Puffy" is that?)

Also recommended: Thomas Jefferson: Author of America (Eminent Lives)

This is one of several volumes in the HarperCollins Eminent Lives series. Each offers a concise rather than comprehensive, much less definitive biography. However, just as Al Hirschfeld's illustrations of various celebrities capture their defining physical characteristics, the authors of books in this series focus on the defining influences and developments during the lives and careers of their respective subjects. In this instance, Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (1469-1527).

Obviously, this is not a definitive biography nor did Ross King intend it to be. However, for most readers, it provides about all of the information they need to understand the meaning and significance of this excerpt from the final chapter in King's biography: "The key to some of the ambiguities may lie in the nature of the man himself. Machiavelli's numerous undertakings - diplomat, playwright, poet, historian, political theorist, farmer, military engineer, militia captain - make him, like his friend Leonardo, a true Renaissance man. Yet, like Leonardo, who denounced the 'beastly madness' of war while devising ingenious and deadly weapons, Machiavelli is awash in paradoxes and inconsistencies...Probably his greatest contradiction was that he understood better than anyone else in the sixteenth century how to seize and maintain political power - and yet, deprived of power himself in 1512, he spent many long years in the political wilderness, making a series of bungling and fruitless attempts to regain his position."

With remarkable precision, concision, and eloquence, King examines not only Machiavelli's life and career but also the cultural, political, and religious environment in which he was so actively involved more than 500 years ago. The Prince (or The Ruler) is Machiavelli's most famous work but was not published until four years after his death, in 1531, when Pope Clement VII granted that permission to Antonio Blado. It was published together with Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy and The History of Florence. The Art of War (1520) was the only one of Machiavelli's works to be published in his lifetime. King notes that The Prince circulated in manuscript and earned for Machiavelli a certain notoriety. "'Everyone hated him because of The Prince,' one commentator observed around the time of Machiavelli's death. 'The good thought him sinful, the wicked thought him even more wicked or more capable than themselves, so that all hated him.' This was no doubt an exaggeration: Machiavelli was far better known as a popular dramatist and controversial state functionary than as the author of a tract on statecraft. Still, in the decades that followed, the hatred did indeed begin to curdle."

King points out that a well-worn edition accompanied Napoleon Bonaparte to the Battle of Waterloo and Adolph Hitler kept a copy on his bedside table. Today, many people who have never read The Prince and know little (if anything) about its author do not hesitate to invoke his name -- or at least apply it as an adjective -- to describe or repudiate any political maneuvering they perceive to be devious. However, King asserts, rather than having been uniformly demonized or unfairly misunderstood "as a preacher of the straightforward message of evil," Machiavelli has been "conscripted into service" by adherents of all manner of political causes because his thought is strangely malleable to any number of diametrically opposing ideologies and approaches."

As I hope these brief remarks indicate, I learned a great deal about Machiavelli, a man of "numerous antimonies," that I did not know before. I am grateful to Ross King for that but also for all that I learned about the extraordinarily interesting age in which Machiavelli lived, more than 500 years ago. It would be an exaggeration to suggest that King "brings it to life." No one could. But he does present material with the skills and eloquence of a storyteller...and in seamless combination with the skills of a cultural anthropologist.

Bravo!

Arturo Toscanini was born in Parma in 1867. His father had served with Garibaldi in his youth. Arturo began at age nine his studies at the Parma Conservatory. The school was French in its orientation.

What was required of a conductor was to lead, to fire up an orchestra. Toscanini wept when he heard LOHENGRIN. He left the conservatory with highest honors in piano, composition, and cello. At school he stood out for zeal, intensity, and knowledge.

A professional engagement at age nineteen involved playing the cello in an opera company touring Brazil. The audience drove two conductors from the podium because a popular Brazilian had received bad reviews. At the request of the musicians Toscanini stepped into the breach to perform AIDA. It was a triumph. He was installed as conductor of the Rossi troupe and conducted eighteen more operas.

Alfredo Catalani, composer of LA WALLY, arranged for Toscanini's employment as a conductor in Italy. In gratitude Toscanini named his children Walter and Wally for the opera. In the early years Toscanini went from house to house and from cello player to conductor all over the country. In LA GIOCONDA the audience clamored for a repeat. Toscanini refused.

He conducted the world premiere of PAGLIACCI. In 1893 he withdrew from conducting for a year. He feared he was being used as a ploy against another conductor. In 1894 he accepted an engagement in Pisa and plunged back into the activity. In the afternoons he played the late Beethoven quartets with friends. The big Wagner works were particularly exacting. The first production of DIE GOTTERDAMMERUNG in Italy was an event. In 1896 at Turin Toscanini conducted the premiere of LA BOHEME.

In 1897 Toscanini married. His son was born nine months later. He said to someone that he was always on the beat. I should have mentioned earlier that Toscanini was noted for his strict fidelity to the printed score. He went over the scores with unrelenting thoroughness.

He arrived at La Scala in 1898. This theater was closest to his heart. People in Milan said that Toscanini would stir things up. Toscanini wanted to create a unified artistic point of view. After the production of FALSTAFF Verdi sent Toscanini a telegram saying thanks, thanks, thanks. Toscanini thought that the voice of Enrico Caruso was at its purest and most electrifying when he appeared at La Scala in 1901.

Toscanini went to the Metropolitan Opera in 1908. He spent seven seasons there. In 1920 he conducted at Padua and Rome. He sought to rebuild the orchestra at La Scala. The orchestra toured America and the theater reopened in 1921. For three years he worked with consuming intensity. Then the matter of Mussolini intruded. From 1926 to 1929 Toscanini took on a dual role. He conducted the New York Philharmonic each season and retained control of La Scala.

Toscanini was coming to occupy a niche all his own. It was consistent with the age--the virtuoso conductor. There was no lack of public fascination with his life, his person. He was invited to conduct at Bayreuth. Fascists bothered Toscanini and his family at Bolgna. From 1933 Toscanini decided to avoid Germany. He took an engagement with the Vienna Philharmonic. He left the New York Philharmonic in 1936. In 1938 he abandoned plans to return to Salzburg for political reasons.

The N.B.C. Symphony was organized for Toscanini. In 1950 at age eighty three he set out for a tour with the N.B.C. Symphony from coast to coast. The drive for perfection was relentless. He dealt with tempo first and insisted that it must be sustained. He sought the proper balance of instruments. The author used both a chronological plan and a thematic plan to illuminate the Toscanini genius.

The author, Howard Taubman, states clearly at the onset of his affecting, personal and fascinating biography of Arturo Toscanini that the maestro would not have allowed it to be published if he'd had the say.
Nonetheless, Mr. Taubman, a music critic with the New York Times, who had many personal encounters with the conductor went ahead with this wonderful account of his life. It is chockablock with information on operas, orchestras, festivals, and musicians encountered in the long life of the little, fiery man from Italy.
I recommend this book to all lovers of music who treasure the memory of an artist dedicated wholly to the art of its creation and presentation.

The Duchess arrives in San Giovanni Rotondo prepared for tales of miracles and mysticism, but not the intensity she finds. But then, who is? She goes about exploring and soon has the trust of many townspeople who knew the Padre, but have been pretty laconic about it until now.Over tea or just sitting together, they tell her in detail their never-told-before stories. Guardian Angels abound. I never can get too much of this! It's Padre Pio's world, and a delight!

Took me just a few hours to devour this book, should be read backwards so that the early chapters provide the humorous relief that I would need. I'm looking for more books on this mega-man