BiblioVault - Books about Italian

Mastering Italian through Global Debate

Marie Bertola

Georgetown University Press, 2023

Critical engagement with complex global issues that provides an effective approach to promoting linguistic proficiency and social responsibility

Mastering Italian through Global Debate is a one-semester textbook designed for students with Advanced-level Italian language skills, moving toward Superior and above. Over the course of each chapter, students gain linguistic and rhetorical skills as they prepare to debate on broad, timely topics, including environmental consciousness, immigration, wealth distribution, surveillance and privacy, cultural diversity, and education. Discussion of compelling issues promotes not only linguistic proficiency but social responsibility through critical engagement with complex global challenges.

Each chapter includes topic-specific reading texts and position papers, giving students insight into issues being widely discussed—and debated—in Italy today. In addition to pre- and post-reading activities, students benefit from lexical development exercises, rhetorical methods sections, and listening exercises with audio available on the Press website. Online resources for instructors include pedagogical recommendations and an answer key.

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The Merits of Women

Wherein Is Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men

Moderata Fonte

University of Chicago Press, 2018

You would as well look for blood in a corpse as for the least shred of decency in a man . . .

Without help from their wives, men are just like unlit lamps . . .

Just think of them as an unreliable clock that tells you it’s ten o’clock when it’s in fact barely two . . .

A man without a woman is like a fly without a head . . .

These are but a small selection of the quips bandied about at this lively gathering of women. The broad topic at hand is the relative pros and cons of men, and the cases in point range from pick-up artists to locker-room talk, and from double standards to fragile masculinity.

Yet this dialogue unfolds not among ironically misandrist millenials venting at their local dive bar, but rather among sixteenth-century women—variously married, widowed, single, and betrothed—attending a respectable Venice garden party. Written in the early 1590s by Moderata Fonte, pseudonym of the Renaissance poet and writer Modesta Pozzo, this literary dialogue interrogates men and men’s treatment of women, and explores by contrast the virtues of singledom and female friendship. As the women diverge from their theme—discussing everything from astrology to the curative powers of plants and minerals—a remarkable group portrait of wisdom, wit, and erudition emerges.

A new introduction by translator Virginia Cox and foreword by Dacia Maraini situate The Merits of Women in its historical context, written as it was on the cusp of Shakespeare’s heyday, and straddling the centuries between the feminist works of Christine de Pizan and Mary Wollstonecraft. Elegantly presented for a general audience, this is a must-read for baby feminists and “nasty women” alike, not to mention the perfect subtle gift for any mansplaining friend who needs a refresher on the merits of women . . . and their superiority to men.

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Migrant Marketplaces

Food and Italians in North and South America

Elizabeth Zanoni

University of Illinois Press, 2018

Italian immigrants to the United States and Argentina hungered for the products of home. Merchants imported Italian cheese, wine, olive oil, and other commodities to meet the demand. The two sides met in migrant marketplaces—urban spaces that linked a mobile people with mobile goods in both real and imagined ways.

Elizabeth Zanoni provides a cutting-edge comparative look at Italian people and products on the move between 1880 and 1940. Concentrating on foodstuffs—a trade dominated by Italian entrepreneurs in New York and Buenos Aires—Zanoni reveals how consumption of these increasingly global imports affected consumer habits and identities and sparked changing and competing connections between gender, nationality, and ethnicity. Women in particular—by tradition tasked with buying and preparing food—had complex interactions that influenced both global trade and their community economies. Zanoni conveys the complicated and often fraught values and meanings that surrounded food, meals, and shopping.

A groundbreaking interdisciplinary study, Migrant Marketplaces offers a new perspective on the linkages between migration and trade that helped define globalization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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Mirtilla, A Pastoral

A Bilingual Edition

Isabella Andreini

Iter Press, 2018

Isabella Andreini was the most famous actress of the Italian Renaissance, the darling of dukes and kings, as well as of less-moneyed theatergoers. As a founding member with her husband, Francesco, of the Compagnia dei Gelosi, she performed ceaselessly throughout Italy and France, and was prized for the new role she invented for women on stage, that of the ingénue with a comic bent. She was also a playwright; in fact, the first woman to publish a pastoral. This modern edition and translation subtly captures the novelty, as well as the imaginative pyrotechnics, of a brilliant, self-made virtuosa of the stage.

The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe - The Toronto Series: Volume 62

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mPalermu, Dancers, and Other Plays

Emma Dante

Swan Isle Press, 2019

Emma Dante’s passionate and brutal plays stem from a need to confront important familial and societal realities in contemporary southern Italy. Her twenty-first century tales challenge stereotypes of the country and stage acts of resistance against the social, political, and economic conditions of Sicily. The seven works in this anthology paint a complex image of the peninsula through stories of disenfranchisement, misogyny, deep-set bigotry, and religious hypocrisy that reveal economic disparities between the north and south of the country, oppressive gender relations, and deep rooted mafioso-like attitudes. Dante’s lyrical and visceral storytelling oscillates between the humorous and the tragic aspects of everyday life, undertaking an irreverent subversion of the status quo with its extreme physicality and unsettling imagery.

This exquisite first English translation of Emma Dante’s work enables English-speaking readers, theatre scholars, and directors alike to encounter character-driven “civic theatre” with its portraits of individuals existing at the fringes of Italy. Ultimately, it allows us to “listen” to those who are not given a voice anywhere else.

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My Language Is a Jealous Lover

Adrián N. Bravi

Rutgers University Press, 2023

Many great writers have been fluent in multiple languages but have never been able to escape their mother tongue. Yet if a native language feels like home, an adopted language sometimes offers a hospitality one cannot find elsewhere.

My Language Is a Jealous Lover explores the plights and successes of authors who lived and wrote in languages other than their mother tongue, from Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov to Ágota Kristóf and Joseph Brodsky. Author Adrián N. Bravi weaves their stories in with his own experiences as an Argentinian-Italian, thinking and writing in the language of his new life while recalling that of his childhood. Bravi bears witness to the frustrations, the soul-searching, the pain, and the joys of embracing another language.

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My Secret Book

Francesco Petrarca

Harvard University Press, 2016

Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374), one of the greatest of Italian poets, was also the leading spirit in the Renaissance movement to revive literary Latin, the language of the Roman Empire, and Greco-Roman culture in general. My Secret Book (Secretum) records “the private conflict of my thoughts,” in the form of a dialogue between Franciscus and Augustinus in the presence of a beautiful woman, Truth personified. The discussion reveals remarkable self-awareness as Petrarca probes and evaluates the springs of his own morally dubious addictions to Fame and Love.

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