Italy Books

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

Fast paced plot gripping the reader from beginning to dramatic ending. Easy reading and lots of good dialogue.
L. Schwartzman, Retired school administrator

If you like fun "whodunits", you will love Magic, Malice and Murder. It's a fun and fast read wth interesting plot twists. Peter Engelman keeps you guessing the entire time. Well done!

Mafalda was my grandmother. She died 13 March of this year (2005). thank you to all of you who bought the book. I am so glad she got to be 'immortalized' in this way. She was truly an exceptional woman.

Without a doubt this is one of the most wonderful cookbooks I have ever read. The stories of young Giampaolo Fallai and his mother that compliment each recipe are to-die-for funny! - On top of that the illustrations by Anna Jurininch are stunning and bring back a sense of an "old time story book" - The recipes are easy to follow and exciting to prepare - truly an original cookbook.

You don't have to be familiar with the cinema of Lina Wertmuller, one of Italy's most controversial directors, to enjoy this intelligent and absorbing book. The author skillfully guides you through an exploration of Wertmuller's four huge box office hits of the 1970s commenting on and elucidating Wertmuller's trenchant social criticism. Scholarly yet still entertaining (a rare combination of writing virtues), this is a must read book that will leave you with a greater understanding of why Wertmuller became the first woman director to be nominated for an Oscar. On a lighter note, the book is complemented by fascinating photos of Wertmuller directing her perennial stars, Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato. You won't be disappointed.

If you remember Italian director Lina Wertmuller's biting commentary in 1970s films such as Swept Away, The Seduction of Mimi and Seven Beauties, you've probably wondered, whatever happened to her? And you've probably wondered why there were no full length books written about her films. Well, here finally is a long-awaited gem. This is a well constructed and invaluable book that although written by a scholar, and therefore impeccably researched, is also entertaining and "readable." This book is a testament to Russo-Bullaro's intelligent, eloquent but approachable style of writing and I recommend it highly to all readers. It also includes an interview with Lina Wertmuller that the author did right before publication (2006) and brings the reader up to date with what the director has been doing and how her ideas have changed since the 1970s.

I've used Mapeasy in four countries and countless U.S. cities and they're by far my favorite. They're easy to read and use and provide the places most tourists want to see. Well worth the money.

we went to europe with it and it was very helpful. it had all the special sights to see and also told you where the best ice-cream was.