Italian Books – Libri italiani

This first substantial history of Italian literature to appear in the English language for forty years provides a comprehensive survey of one of the richest and most influential literatures of Europe.

One, No One and One Hundred Thousand (Italian: Uno, Nessuno e Centomila) is a 1926 novel by the Italian writer Luigi Pirandello. Story Vitangelo discovers by way of a completely irrelevant question that his wife poses to him that everyone he knows, everyone he has ever met, has constructed a Vitangelo persona in their own imagination and that none of these personas corresponds to the image of Vitangelo that he himself has constructed and believes himself to be. The reader is immediately immersed in a cruel game of falsifiying projections, mirroring the reality of social existence itself, which imperiously dictate their rules. As a result, the first, ironic "awareness" of Vitangelo consists in the knowledge of that which he definitely is not; the preliminary operation must therefore consist in the spiteful destruction of all of these fictitious masks. Only after this radical step toward madness and folly in the eyes of the world can Vitangelo finally begin to follow the path toward his true self. He discovers, though, that if his body can be one, his spirit certainly is not. And this Faustian duplicity gradually develops into a disconcerting and extremely complex multiplicity. How can one come to know the true...

Everyone interested in Italian Literature should read these classics. From Umberto Eco to Italo Svevo, from Alessandro Manzoni to Natalia Ginzburg, and many more Italian writers that should be in your collection.

It is April 1204, and Constantinople, the splendid capital of the Byzantine Empire, is being sacked and burned by the knights of the Fourth Crusade.

An armchair traveler’s companion to Donna Leon’s Brunetti mysteries: “a splendid present for mystery-fiction fans travel-lit buffs” (Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal). Follow Commissario Guido Brunetti, star of Donna Leon’s international bestselling mystery series, on over a dozen walks that highlight Venice’s churches, markets, bars, cafes, and palazzos. In Brunetti’s Venice, tourists and armchair travelers follow in the footsteps of Brunetti as he traverses the city he knows and loves. With his acute eye, fascination with history, ear for language, passion for food, and familiarity with the dark realities of crime and corruption, Brunetti is the perfect companion for any walk across La Serenissima. Over a dozen walks, encompassing all six regions of Venice as well as the lagoon, lead readers down calli, over canali, and through campi. Important locations from the best-selling novels are highlighted and major themes and characters are explored, all accompanied by poignant excerpts from the novels. This is a must-have companion book for any lover of Donna Leon’s wonderful mysteries.

As a young Florentine envoy to the courts of France and the Italian principalities, Niccolò Machiavelli was able to observe firsthand the lives of people strongly united under one powerful ruler.

Writer Primo Levi (1919-1987), an Italian Jew, did not come to the wide attention of the English-reading audience until the last years of his life. A survivor of the Holocaust and imprisonment in Auschwitz, Levi is considered to be one of the century's most compelling voices, and The Periodic Table is his most famous book. Springboarding from his training as a chemist, Levi uses the elements as metaphors to create a cycle of linked, somewhat autobiographical tales, including stories of the Piedmontese Jewish community he came from, and of his response to the Holocaust.

The Day of the Owl (Italian: Il giorno della civetta) is a crime novel about the Mafia by Leonardo Sciascia, finished in 1960 and published in 1961. Story In a small town, early on a Saturday morning, a bus is about to leave the small square to go market in the next town nearby. A gunshot is heard and the figure running for the bus is shot twice in the back, with what is discovered as a lupara (a sawn-off shotgun that the mafia use for their killings.) The passengers and bus driver deny having seen the murderer. A Carabinieri captain from Parma, Bellodi, gets on the case, ruffling feathers in his contemporaries and colleagues alike. Soon he discovers a link that doesn't stop in Sicily, but goes onwards towards Rome and the Minister Mancuso and Senator Livigno. It seems that the man shot, Salvatore Colasberna, was the owner of a small construction company. He had been warned that he should take "protection" from mafia members, but he refused. Although his company was only a very small one, the local mafia decides to make an example of him and has him killed. Using faintly corrupt methods, Bellodi traps one man and uses the names...

The eight stories in this collection, by Moravia, Pavese, Pratolini, and other modern writers, have been selected as being representative of contemporary Italian writing. The English translations provided are literal rather than literary, and there are notes and biographies to help the student of Italian. However, the volume can also be helpful to Italians, who can improve their English by studying a strict rendering of stories with which that may already be familiar.

This anthology highlights the rich range of modern Italian fiction, presenting the first English translations of works by many famous authors. Contents include fables and stories by Italo Calvino, Elsa Morante, Alberto Moravia, and Cesare Pavese; historical fiction by Leonardo Sciascia and Mario Rigoni Stern; and little-known tales by Luigi Pirandello and Carlo Emilio Gadda. No further apparatus or reference is necessary for the self-contained text. Appropriate for high school and college courses as well as self-study, this volume will prove a fine companion for teachers and intermediate-level students of Italian language and literature as well as readers wishing to brush up on their language skills.

This edition gives a side-by-side parallel translation of Dante's Divine Comedy using Longfellow's translation. The Divine Comedy is an epic poem written by Dante Alighieri between 1308 and his death in 1321. It is generally considered to be the preeminent work of Italian literature and one of the greatest works of world literature. The poem is written in the Tuscan dialect, and the poem helped establish this dialect as the standardized Italian language. The poem is divided into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. At the superficial level, the poem describes Dante's travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven; but at a deeper level, it ia an allegory of the soul's journey towards God. In order to articulate this journey towards God, Dante uses on medieval Christian theology and philosophy, especially Thomistic philosophy and the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas. Longfellow's translation is considered to be the best translation, overall. Longfellow, being a poet himself, was able to create a flowing translation that has not been surpassed.

The Solitude of Prime Numbers (original: La solitudine dei numeri primi) is a novel by Italian writer Paolo Giordano, published in 2008. It also won the 2008 Strega Prize. A film version of the novel, with minor adaptations and directed by Saverio Costanzo, was released in 2010. Plot Summary The novel narrates the childhood and young adult life of a boy, Mattia, and a girl, Alice, both of whom had exposure to traumatic situations when they were both 8 years old. Alice bears the physical scars of a terrible skiing accident which nearly killed her. Mattia bears the emotional scars of having lost his disabled twin sister, after leaving her alone in a park in order to attend the birthday party of a friend. These traumas manifest themselves again physically later in both of their lives, with Alice being anorexic, and Mattia cutting himself. At school, both are outsiders, much as prime numbers are outsiders from the other numbers. Both lonely, they befriend each other, forming a special relationship — very close but never romantic. The relationship is compared to Prime pairs: always together, but never touching. When the gifted Mattia wins a mathematics posting that takes him thousands of miles away,...