Italian

La conversazione. Un modello italiano

La conversazione. Un modello italiano

December 29, 2011

by Amedeo Quondam
Donzelli, 347 pp., € 28.00

CECELIA OLIVERIO 

“Would you care to bestow the grace of your dancing upon the gathered company?” asks the perfect courtier to his advisee. “Why, most absolutely not, my dear friend,” a slightly less than gracious Prince of Salina responds: “I’m afraid the mere sight of all this decadence has left me truly tired and emptied of energy.” “We shall therefore await the opportune moment,” is the courtier’s reply. “Certainly,” concedes the prince: “Though, I do eagerly anticipate your next words on sprezzatura. That...

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Paura di cambiare Book Cover

Paura di cambiare. Crisi e critica del concetto di cultura

November 1, 2011

by Francesco Erspamer 
Donzelli, 169 pp., € 16.00

JOHN WELSH - The Invention of Culture

It is a conversation all too familiar for anyone involved in the humanities. It happens most frequently in situations of involuntary socialization—parties, receptions, dinners—but it can happen anywhere you find yourself in the company of strangers. Sooner or later, the question comes up. “So, what do you do?” You respond. You’re a student, perhaps a graduate student or a young teacher. “What do you study?” Philosophy maybe...
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tastes and temptations

Tastes and Temptations: Food and Art in Renaissance Italy

March 1, 2011

by John Varriano
University of California Press, 282 pp., $19.50

PETER LIEBERMAN

In 1505 the Florentine painter Andrea del Sarto, at a banquet held by the artistic and gastronomic confraternity known as ‘the Company of the Cauldron,’ presented a scale model of the Florence Baptistery to his fellow diners. Architectural models were becoming common at the beginning of the sixteenth century, but what made del Sarto’s achievement so spectacular was that his miniature Baptistery was entirely edible—made from cheese, marzipan, sausage, and various fowl...

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Book Cover Bernini: His Life and His Rome

Bernini: His Life and His Rome

March 20, 2012
by Franco Mormando
University of Chicago Press, 456 pp., € 35.00
 

JULIANNE VANWAGENEN

In a Gian Lorenzo Bernini stream-of-consciousness word-association game one might come up with Rome, marble fountain, St. Peter’s, baroque, post-Reformation Catholicism. Is there anything to add to that list? Perhaps adultery, politicking, rape, sodomy, narcissism, astrological prophecies? Franco Mormando, professor of Romance Languages at Boston College, argues in his new biography Bernini: His Life and His Rome, thatto define Bernini without the...
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battle of adwa

The Battle of Adwa: African Victory in the Age of Empire

March 23, 2012

by Raymond Jonas 
Harvard University Press, 413 pp., $29.95

JOHN WELSH - Empire defeated

Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army marched a remarkable 135 miles from Chancellorsville, Virginia to the battle of Gettysburg. Napoleon’s Russian Campaign, an arduous three-month march from Vilnus to Moscow, stretched nearly 500 miles. Both campaigns ended in a catastrophic defeat that dramatically altered the course of human history. Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg turned the American Civil War against the South and changed the future shape...

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Electronic Information Age Book

The Electric Information Age Book: McLuhan/Agel/Fiore and the Experimental Paperback

April 15, 2012
by Jeffrey Schnapp and Adam Michaels
Princeton Architectural Press, 216 pp., $19.95
 
JULIANNE VANWAGENEN 
 
What do The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Electric Information Age Book have in common? They both have Tom Wolfe, the Grateful Dead, Allen Ginsburg, revolution, counter-culture. Both center around 1967-68, and they are both a textual reproduction, retelling, documentary, of a cultural creation of the electric age. Tom Wolfe’s novelistic telling of the Merry Pranksters’ mimics, in form, the...
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I funeracconti cover

I funeracconti

March 19, 2012
by Benedetta Palmieri
Feltrinelli, 140 pp., € 14.00
 

ELENA CAMPANI 

 
Abituati a vedere artisti e scrittori trattare il tema della morte in maniere piuttosto estreme, dal pulp allo spiritualismo olistico passando per gli psicodrammi stucchevoli, questo libro ci colpisce perché lo affronta con un equilibrio e un decoro tanto rari quanto vagamente surreali, con lo spirito di chi, anche solo per un attimo, esorcizza la fine della vita e ne fa un evento in fondo naturale, in poche parole con la disposizione d’...
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scrittori polemisti

Scrittori polemisti: Pasolini, Sciascia, Arbasino, Testori, Eco 

April 17, 2012

di Bruno Pischedda 
Bollati Boringhieri, 338 pp., € 18.50

DALILA COLUCCI- La scommessa dell'impegno

“Lo scrittore è ‘in situazione’ nella sua epoca: ogni parola ha i suoi echi. Ogni silenzio anche”: è una suggestione di natura sartriana quella che si avverte nell’accostarsi per la prima volta a Scrittori polemisti, ultimo libro di Bruno Pischedda, docente di letteratura italiana contemporanea presso l’Università di Milano. Questo importante volume evoca infatti, fin dal titolo, un’ampia riflessione sul ruolo...
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Italia reloaded. Ripartire con la cultura Book Cover

Italia reloaded. Ripartire con la cultura

May 7, 2012

by Christian Caliandro and Pier Luigi Sacco 
Il Mulino, 146 pp., 13.50 €

JULIANNE VANWAGENEN - Culture as investment

In the book’s premise, authors Christian Caliandro and Pier Luigi Sacco clearly state their goals for the work: (1) distinguish between cultural production in Italy that safeguards Italy’s artistic and historic assets and cultural production that makes contemporary cultural strides, (2) reassess the widespread conception of Italy’s artistic/historical patrimony as a tesoro (...
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Atlante della letteratura italiana book cover

Atlante della letteratura italiana, vol. II: Dalla Controriforma alla Restaurazione

May 5, 2012

a cura di Sergio Luzzatto e Gabriele Pedullà (vol. II a cura di Erminia Irace)
Einaudi, 946 pp., ill., 85.00 €

MARCO ARESU - Tra geografia e storia

“Prometto di non scrivere nessuna storia letteraria, nessun capitolo di storia letteraria, prima di avere letto per intero tutte le opere prese in considerazione e di ignorare tutte le precedenti storie letterarie a meno di essere certo che chi le ha scritte ha letto veramente tutte le opere che ha preso in considerazione”. Con queste parole Remo Ceserani concludeva un suo...

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Galileo's Muse: Renaissance Mathematics and the Arts  Book Cover

Galileo's Muse: Renaissance Mathematics and the Arts

May 5, 2012
by Mark Peterson
Harvard University Press, 338 pp., $28.95
 

PETER LIEBERMAN

 
Very often it takes the work of an outsider, with a fresh pair of eyes, to make an original contribution to any academic field—especially a field such as Italian Studies, whose tentacles reach into any imaginable branch of the humanities or sciences. Mark Peterson: a physicist, mathematician, and astronomer, is precisely that much needed outsider to the traditional dominion of italianisti. Peterson’s recent Galileo’s Muse offers a...
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In Your Face: Professional Improprietes and the Art of Being Conspicuous in Sixteenth-Century Italy book cover

In Your Face: Professional Improprietes and the Art of Being Conspicuous in Sixteenth-Century Italy

October 9, 2012

by Douglas Biow
Stanford University Press, 246 pp., $19.95

DAN TURELLO

The ideals of grace and ease were ones that came to find great success and cultural currency during the Renaissance, in great measure thanks to the writing of Baldassarre Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, in which he describes the virtues of sprezzatura, the art of concealing the efforts behind one’s striving, so as to make it appear facile. The Galateo, by Giovanni della Casa, with its notion of proper manners and correct conduct specific to all occasions, is also a product of this time....

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