A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY19 start with T start with T
Through Teresa and other women characters, Neera addressed the injustice of such societal restrictions in nineteenth-century Italy. Neera's narratives are noted for their subtle psychoanalytical presentation of feminine states of mind as well as for an unflinching examination of society.
This book examines the theater of narration, an Italian performance genre and aesthetic that revisits historical events of national importance from local perspectives, drawing on the rich relationship between personal experiences and historical accounts. Incorporating original research from the private archives of leading narrators—artists who write and perform their work—Juliet Guzzetta argues that the practice teaches audiences how ordinary people aren’t simply witnesses to history but participants in its creation.
The theater of narration emerged in Italy during the labor and student protests, domestic terrorism, and social progress of the 1970s. Developing Dario Fo and Franca Rame’s style of political theater, influenced by Jerzy Grotowski and Bertolt Brecht, and following in the freewheeling actor‑author traditions of the commedia dell’arte, narrators created a new form of popular theater that grew in prominence in the 1990s and continues to gain recognition. Guzzetta traces the history of the theater of narration, contextualizing its origins—both political and intellectual—and centers the contributions of Teatro Settimo, a performance group overlooked in previous studies. She also examines the genre’s experiments in television and media.
The first full-length book in English on the subject, The Theater of Narration leverages close readings and a wealth of primary sources to examine the techniques used by narrators to remake history—a process that reveals the ways in which history itself is a theater of narration.
Who were the first celebrity couples? How was their success forged? Which forces influenced their self-fashioning and marketing strategies?
These questions are at the core of this study, which looks at the birth of a phenomenon, that of the couple in show business, with a focus on the promotional strategies devised by two professional performers: Giovan Battista Andreini (1576–1654) and Virginia Ramponi (1583–ca.1631). This book examines their artistic path – a deliberately crafted and mutually beneficial joint career – and links it to the historical, social, and cultural context of post-Tridentine Italy. Rooted in a broad research field, encompassing theatre history, Italian studies, celebrity studies, gender studies, and performance studies, The Theatre Couple in Early Modern Italy revises the conventional view of the Italian diva, investigates the deployment of Catholic devotion as a marketing tool, and argues for the importance of the couple system in the history of Commedia dell’Arte, a system that continues to shape celebrity today.
Italy, from the toe to the Alps, was the scene of the longest, bloodiest, most frustrating, and least understood series of battles fought by the Western Allies during World War II. Now, John S. D. Eisenhower offers a new look at the Italian campaign, emphasizing the Anzio offensive—an operation pushed by Winston Churchill that fell largely to American troops to carry out. It was visualized as an amphibious landing of two Allied divisions behind German lines that would force the Wehrmacht to evacuate all of Italy. But the Germans held on and, with the arrival of reinforcements, nearly wiped out the Allied troops pinned down at Anzio Beach.
By portraying that struggle from the perspectives of both commanders and foot soldiers, this prominent military historian focuses on the experiences of the individuals who fought in the Italian campaign to reveal what the battle at Anzio was all about. But more than the account of one operation, They Fought at Anzio covers the entire Italian campaign, from the landings at Salerno to the capture of Rome.
Eisenhower brings a trained eye to reconstructing the difficult terrain of battle, approaching the Anzio campaign as a contest between opposing commands striving to anticipate and counter the opponent’s moves—not as a field exercise but as a deadly struggle for survival. He analyzes the command decisions that brought about the Anzio stalemate, interspersing his account with personal experiences of the men in the trenches, the nurses of the 56th Evacuation Hospital, and the young officers witnessing the horrors of war for the first time.
As a study in command, Eisenhower’s narrative gives new credit to generals Lucian Truscott and Fred Walker and assesses both the strengths and weaknesses of General Mark Clark, allowing us to grasp the situation as it appeared to those in command. He also offers compelling portraits of German commanders Field Marshal Albert Kesselring and General Frido von Senger und Etterlin.
It has been said that Anzio was a soldier’s battle, remembered more for blood shed than for military objectives achieved. By focusing on the experiences of the soldiers who fought there and the decisions of commanders in perilous circumstances, They Fought at Anzio offers a new appreciation of the contributions of both and a new understanding of this unheralded theater of the war.
Krause offers a revelatory look into how families involved in the fashion industry are coping with globalization based on longterm research in Prato, the historic hub of textile production in the heart of metropolitan Tuscany. She brings to the fore the tensions—over value, money, beauty, family, care, and belonging—that are reaching a boiling point as the country struggles to deal with the same migration pressures that are triggering backlash all over Europe and North America. Tight Knit tells a fascinating story about the heterogeneity of contemporary capitalism that will interest social scientists, immigration experts, and anyone curious about how globalization is changing the most basic of human conditions—making a living and making a life.
One of the most influential political thinkers of the twentieth century, Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) has left an indelible mark on philosophy and critical theory. His innovative work on history, society, power, and the state has influenced several generations of readers and political activists, and even shaped important developments in postcolonial thought. But Gramsci’s thinking is scattered across the thousands of notebook pages he wrote while he was imprisoned by Italy’s fascist government from 1926 until shortly before his death.
To guide readers through Gramsci’s life and works, historian Jean-Yves Frétigné offers To Live Is to Resist, an accessible, compelling, and deeply researched portrait of an extraordinary figure. Throughout the book, Frétigné emphasizes Gramsci’s quiet heroism and his unwavering commitment to political practice and resistance. Most powerfully, he shows how Gramsci never surrendered, even in conditions that stripped him of all power—except, of course, the power to think.
By far the most "historical" opera in the active repertoire, Tosca is set in a very specific time and place: Rome, from June 17 to 18, 1800. But as Nicassio demonstrates, history in Tosca is distorted by nationalism and by the vehement anticlerical perceptions of papal Rome shared by Sardou, Puccini, and the librettists. To provide the historical background necessary for understanding Tosca, Nicassio takes a detailed look at Rome in 1800 as each of Tosca's main characters would have seen it—the painter Cavaradossi, the singer Tosca, and the policeman Scarpia. Finally, she provides a scene-by-scene musical and dramatic analysis of the opera.
"[Nicassio] must be the only living historian who can boast that she once sang the role of Tosca. Her deep knowledge of Puccini's score is only to be expected, but her understanding of daily and political life in Rome at the close of the 18th century is an unanticipated pleasure. She has steeped herself in the period and its prevailing culture-literary, artistic, and musical-and has come up with an unusual, and unusually entertaining, history."—Paul Bailey, Daily Telegraph
"In Tosca's Rome, Susan Vandiver Nicassio . . . orchestrates a wealth of detail without losing view of the opera and its pleasures. . . . Nicassio aims for opera fans and for historians: she may well enthrall both."—Publishers Weekly
"This is the book that ranks highest in my estimation as the most in-depth, and yet highly entertaining, journey into the story of the making of Tosca."—Catherine Malfitano
"Nicassio's prose . . . is lively and approachable. There is plenty here to intrigue everyone-seasoned opera lovers, musical novices, history buffs, and Italophiles."—Library Journal
This unique interdisciplinary essay collection offers a fresh perspective on the active involvement of American women authors in the nineteenth-century transatlantic world. Internationally diverse contributors explore topics ranging from women's social and political mobility to their authorship and activism. While a number of essays focus on such well-known writers as Margaret Fuller, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, other, perhaps lesser-known authors are also included, such as E. D. E. N. Southworth, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Elizabeth Peabody, Jeannette Hart, and Laura Richards.
These essays show the spectrum of interests and activities in which nineteenth-century women were involved as they moved, geographically and metaphorically, toward gaining their independence and the right to control their lives. Traveling far and wide—to Italy, France, Great Britain, and the Bahamas—these writers came into contact with realities far different from their own. On topics ranging from homeopathy and literary endeavors to politics and revolution, they conversed with others, reaching and inspiring transnational audiences with their words and deeds, and creating a space for self-expression in the rapidly changing transatlantic world.
As Finchelstein explains, nacionalismo, the right-wing ideology that developed in Argentina, was not the wholesale imitation of Italian fascism that Mussolini wished it to be. Argentine nacionalistas conflated Catholicism and fascism, making the bold claim that their movement had a central place in God’s designs for their country. Finchelstein explores the fraught efforts of nationalistas to develop a “sacred” ideological doctrine and political program, and he scrutinizes their debates about Nazism, the Spanish Civil War, imperialism, anti-Semitism, and anticommunism. Transatlantic Fascism shows how right-wing groups constructed a distinctive Argentine fascism by appropriating some elements of the Italian model and rejecting others. It reveals the specifically local ways that a global ideology such as fascism crossed national borders.
Studying Whitman’s reception from a transnational perspective shows how many countries were simultaneously carving out a new modernity in literature and culture. In this sense, Bernardini not only shows the interconnectedness of various international agents in understanding and contributing to the spread of Whitman’s work, but, more largely, illustrates a constellation of similar pre-modernist and modernist sensibilities. This stands in contrast to the notion of sudden innovation: modernity was not easy to achieve, and it did not imply a complete refusal of tradition. Instead, a continuous and fruitful negotiation between tradition and innovation, not a sudden break with the literary past, is at the very heart of the Italian and transnational reception of Whitman. The book is grounded in archival studies and the examination of primary documents of noteworthy discovery.
Always stylistically innovative, thematically defiant and driven by a strong political agenda, Italian cinema lends itself particularly well to a critical investigation aimed at radicalising the impact of psychoanalysis on film. In doing exactly that, the book deliberately avoids the standard cultural and historical approaches to film. Instead, it moves freely amongst some of the most widely celebrated – as well as lesser-known – Italian films of the post-war period, discussing the ways in which they tackle such themes as desire, fantasy, sexuality, violence and the law, to mention but a few. The main focus is on the work of those directors who most effectively engage with the divisive nature of the moving image: Antonioni, Pasolini and Rossellini. In addition, the book provides ample and insightful references to films by Visconti, Bertolucci, Bellocchio, Moretti, Petri, Fellini, Ferreri, and many more.
Travels through France and Italy is a landmark work in travel literature. Full of prejudice, grousing, sharp observation, and caustic satire, it is the first travel book in modern literature to go beyond the simple conveyance of information to reflect the writer's state of mind.
A history of Turin, home to Fiat, the Einaudi publishing house, and writers including Italo Calvino, Primo Levi, Cesare Pavese, and Natalia Ginzburg.
Unknown to most foreigners, as they follow each other around Florence and Siena, Rome and Venice, the Italy they see today is the result of a second renaissance. And its seat was a city they needed to discover, in all its enigmatic allure, if they were truly to understand the nation it brought into being. As Umberto Eco says, “Without Italy, Turin would have been more or less the same. But without Turin, Italy would have been very different.” This baroque jewel at the foot of the Alps provides a unique prism on the story of modern Italy: not just as a founding capital, but also in kindling a political, cultural, and economic regeneration after the tragedies of dictatorship and civil war.
Their emergence as a dynamo of national industrialization, symbolized by Fiat, had made the factories of Turin the original seat of both Italian capitalism and socialism, and, accordingly, the heart of resistance to Mussolini. After the Second World War, the city experienced parallel revivals. On the one hand, Fiat proved a foundation stone for Italy’s famous “economic miracle"; on the other, the Einaudi publishing house became a platform for the greatest local flowering of Italian culture since the days of the Medicis, not least through several of its own employees, including Natalia Ginzburg, Cesare Pavese, and Italo Calvino. These competing energies were personified by the respective enigmas who presided over these agencies of renewal, Gianni Agnelli and Giulio Einaudi.
But their rivalry also only demonstrated the polarities that have long defined this royal city of arcaded streets and squares, with its wild mountain backdrop. That contrast is expressed even by the city’s rival football teams: the seigneurial Juventus, long bankrolled by the Agnelli family, its perennial success toasted throughout the peninsula; and Torino, the fallen giants whose tragic legacy commands the underdog fidelity of local nostalgics, workers, and rebels.
Exploring the contribution of Turin to modern Italy, Chris McGrath entwines some of the nation’s most celebrated names with less familiar citizens who illuminate the gaps: from the forgotten poet who bears exquisite witness to the city’s crepuscular atmosphere at the turn of the last century, to the Torino footballer who fought with the partisans before becoming a star of neorealist cinema.
Risorgimento, resistance, reconstruction: none of these decisive phases in Italy’s modern evolution would have been the same without this unsung city.
First privately published in 1921, The Twilight of Rome's Papal Nobility provides an intimate look at a family who grew up accustomed to almost unimaginable wealth, power, and glamour. A descendant of two popes, Ugo Boncompagni Ludovisi recounts the life story of his mother Agnese, who was raised in a palace full of priceless artwork, including pieces by Caravaggio and Michelangelo. We get a window into Agnese's private life—her girlhood, marriage, and raising of several children—as her public life becomes increasingly tumultuous amid the family’s struggles to retain its property. A tender elegy to a bygone era, Boncompagni Ludovisi's story provides a unique perspective on Italian history and Rome’s urban redevelopment.
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