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477 books match the query 'Italy' and 19 start with i

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Iceman

Uncovering the Life and Times of a Prehistoric Man Found in an Alpine Glacier

Brenda Fowler

University of Chicago Press, 2001

On September 19, 1991 a couple hiking along an Alpine ridge stumbled upon a frozen, intact corpse melting out of a glacier. He was dubbed "the Iceman," and his discovery—along with the realization that he was actually 5,000 years old—set off a whirlwind of political, scientific, and media activity that made him an overnight sensation. In this remarkable and dramatic book, Brenda Fowler takes readers through the bizarre odyssey that began in the Stone Age and continued for years after the Iceman was unearthed.

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Illegitimacy in Renaissance Florence

Thomas Kuehn

University of Michigan Press, 2002

As far back as Jacob Burckhardt, illegitimate children have been considered advantaged, insofar as they lacked family obligations. Celebrated Renaissance figures such as Petrarch, Boccaccio, Alberti, and da Vinci were born illegitimately. Of course, their status put these children at a legal and a social disadvantage that was nearly impossible to overcome in usual circumstances. Illegitimacy in Renaissance Florence is the first systematic study of a population of illegitimate children--in this case in the city often seen at the heart of Renaissance politics and culture, Florence.
The Florentine catasto, a fiscal survey of households taken at several points in the fifteenth century, locates hundreds of illegitimate children and reveals a great deal about their household circumstances and parentage. Supplementing this information are notarial documents and family account books. Illegitimacy in Renaissance Florence places Florentine illegitimate children in a complete legal context, culminating in examination of several Florentine legal cases. Thomas Kuehn shows how lawyers were called on to cope with and make legal sense of the actions and prejudices of Florentines toward their illegitimate kin.
It is clear, in its simplest terms, that illegitimacy in Florence was a permanent, if not fixed, status. Most illegitimate children, especially girls, were abandoned; infanticide was undoubtedly practiced. But even those children raised by benevolent fathers and granted legitimation always remained "legitimatus" and not "legitimus." Florentines whose illegitimate paternity was admitted were overwhelmingly born of elite fathers but poor or servile mothers. In neither social nor legal terms did the illegitimate share fully in the personhood of the legitimate adult male Florentine citizen. Still, ambiguities of status could be useful for those with sufficient wealth and social standing to exploit their potential.
Illegitimacy in Renaissance Florence will appeal to social historians of Europe, medieval and early modern, especially those concerned with family life, women, and children, as well as all those interested in Florentine history. Legal historians will find it useful as well.
Thomas Kuehn is Professor of History, Clemson University.

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Images and Translations

The Etruscans Abroad

Larissa Bonfante

University of Michigan Press, 2023

Professor Larissa Bonfante’s great gift was the ability to evoke, in a fresh, immediate, and convincing way, the experiences, beliefs, and thoughts of people living more than two thousand years ago. Her final publication, Images and Translations: The Etruscans Abroad, communicates the sensations of other times and places, from the day-to-day to the solemnly ritualistic.

The world of the Etruscans, sophisticated and pleasure-loving, radiated throughout a vast area of the ancient world – a world very different from our own. Relying on a wealth of creative works, Images and Translations examines the expertise and productions of the artists who made them, the tastes of those who used them, and the sometimes surprising results of the exchanges between creators and buyers. Just as the French demand for Chinese ceramics in the seventeenth century gave birth to the unprecedented famille colors, so the production of Greek ceramics for the Etruscan market produced singularly expressive depictions. Humorous, pious, or erotic to the buyers, they could be shocking to the culture that made them.

Images and Translations explores areas in much closer economic and cultural contact than is usually recognized. The volume finds threads of connection not only between Italy and Greece, but between Italy and northern Europe—today’s France and Germany—as well as between Italy and the Near East. Etruscan influence runs through Western history, into the Renaissance, and emerges in imagery still evocative today.

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Imperial City

Rome under Napoleon

Susan Vandiver Nicassio

University of Chicago Press, 2009

In 1798, the armies of the French Revolution tried to transform Rome from the capital of the Papal States to a Jacobin Republic. For the next two decades, Rome was the subject of power struggles between the forces of the Empire and the Papacy, while Romans endured the unsuccessful efforts of Napoleon’s best and brightest to pull the ancient city into the modern world. Against this historical backdrop, Nicassio weaves together an absorbing social, cultural, and political history of Rome and its people. Based on primary sources and incorporating two centuries of Italian, French, and international research, her work reveals what life was like for Romans in the age of Napoleon.

“A remarkable book that wonderfully vivifies an understudied era in the history of Rome. . . . This book will engage anyone interested in early modern cities, the relationship between religion and daily life, and the history of the city of Rome.”—Journal of Modern History

“An engaging account of Tosca’s Rome. . . . Nicassio provides a fluent introduction to her subject.”—History Today

“Meticulously researched, drawing on a host of original manuscripts, memoirs, personal letters, and secondary sources, enabling [Nicassio] to bring her story to life.”—History

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In Defense of Women

A Bilingual Edition

Pompeo Colonna

Iter Press, 2024

An important contribution to early public debates on the nature of women written by a cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church.

Pompeo Colonna’s In Defense of Women (1530), presented in this volume in Latin and English translation, is one of several important defenses of women composed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by male advocates of women’s moral and intellectual worth. Known as a cardinal and a warrior, but also as an active participant in sixteenth-century Italian literary circles, Colonna addresses the work to his cousin Vittoria Colonna, the most renowned Italian woman poet of the era, who, he writes, had urged him to undertake it. His Defense not only refutes arguments of women’s inferiority and incapacity but, remarkably, asserts their ability to hold political office and govern. It contains original Latin text and a critical introduction by Franco Minonzio. It also features a foreword by Margaret L. King, as well as a postscript by King, tracing the separate male-authored and female-authored Renaissance defenses of women.

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In Dialogue with the Other Voice in Sixteenth-century Italy

Literary and Social Contexts for Women's Writing

Edited by Julie D. Campbell and Maria Galli Stampino

Iter Press, 2011

This excellent collection of essays and texts surveys the culture and intellectual context of early modern Italy in order to render more intelligible the writing of Italian women. The role of women in society and the persistent misogyny even of the most pro-woman texts are explored in the essays, and the recent critical debates are examined. The translations make available in English a selection of male-authored texts which directly or indirectly elicited the spirited responses of women, for which the volume is aptly entitled “In Dialogue.” A valuable classroom resource, the volume is an important addition to The Other Voice: Toronto series.
—Elissa Weaver
Professor of Italian, Emerita, University of Chicago

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In Praise of Disobedience

Clare of Assisi, A Novel

Dacia Maraini

Rutgers University Press, 2023

An author receives a mysterious e-mail begging her to tell the story of Clare of Assisi, the thirteenth-century Italian saint. At first annoyed by the request, the author begins to research Saint Clare and becomes captivated by her life. We too are transported into the strange and beautiful world of medieval Italy, witnessing the daily rituals of convent life. At the center of that life is Saint Clare, a subversive and compelling figure full of contradictions: a physically disabled woman who travels widely in her imagination, someone unforgivingly harsh to herself yet infinitely generous to the women she supervises, a practitioner of self-abnegation who nevertheless knows her own worth. A visionary who liberated herself from the chains of materialism and patriarchy, Saint Clare here becomes an inspirational figure for a new generation of readers.

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In the Shadow of the Swastika

Hermann Wygoda

University of Illinois Press, 1998

He was known first as a Warsaw ghetto smuggler, then as Comandante Enrico. He traveled under false identity papers and worked at a German border patrol station. Throughout the years of the Holocaust, Hermann Wygoda lived a life of narrow escapes, daring masquerades, and battles that almost defy reason.

Unique among Holocaust memoirs, In the Shadow of the Swastika, now in paperback, celebrates the memory of a man who received decorations from three Western powers and who, years later, was honored posthumously by the Italian city he helped to liberate.

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Infinite Variety

The Life and Legend of the Marchesa Casati

Scot D. Ryersson

University of Minnesota Press, 2004

For the first three decades of the twentieth century, the Marchesa Casati astounded Europe: nude servants gilded in gold leaf attended her; bizarre wax mannequins sat as guests at her dining table; and she was infamous for her evening strolls, naked beneath her furs, parading cheetahs on diamond-studded leashes. Artists painted, sculpted, and photographed her; poets praised her strange beauty. Among them were Gabriele D’Annunzio, Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, Cecil Beaton, and American writers Tennessee Williams, Jack Kerouac, and Ezra Pound. Couturiers Fortuny, Poiret, and Erté dressed her. Some became lovers, others awestruck admirers, but all were influenced by this extraordinary muse. The extravagance ended in 1930 when Casati was more than twenty-five million dollars in debt. Fleeing to London, she spent her final flamboyant years there until her death in 1957. Now nearly a half-century later, Casati’s fashion legacy continues to inspire such designers as John Galliano, Karl Lagerfeld, and Tom Ford. Fully authorized and accurate, this is the fantastic story of the Marchesa Luisa Casati.Scot D. Ryersson is an award-winning freelance writer, illustrator, and graphic designer. He lives in New Jersey.Michael Orlando Yaccarino is a freelance writer specializing in international genre film, fashion, music, and unconventional historical figures. He lives in New Jersey.

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Influences

Art, Optics, and Astrology in the Italian Renaissance

Mary Quinlan-McGrath

University of Chicago Press, 2013

Today few would think of astronomy and astrology as fields related to theology. Fewer still would know that physically absorbing planetary rays was once considered to have medical and psychological effects. But this was the understanding of light radiation held by certain natural philosophers of early modern Europe, and that, argues Mary Quinlan-McGrath, was why educated people of the Renaissance commissioned artworks centered on astrological themes and practices.

Influences is the first book to reveal how important Renaissance artworks were designed to be not only beautiful but also—perhaps even primarily—functional. From the fresco cycles at Caprarola, to the Vatican’s Sala dei Pontefici, to the Villa Farnesina, these great works were commissioned to selectively capture and then transmit celestial radiation, influencing the bodies and minds of their audiences. Quinlan-McGrath examines the sophisticated logic behind these theories and practices and, along the way, sheds light on early creation theory; the relationship between astrology and natural theology; and the protochemistry, physics, and mathematics of rays.

An original and intellectually stimulating study, Influences adds a new dimension to the understanding of aesthetics among Renaissance patrons and a new meaning to the seductive powers of art.

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Innovation in the Italian Counter-Reformation

Shannon McHugh

University of Delaware Press, 2011

The enduring "black legend" of the Italian Counter-Reformation, which has held sway in both scholarly and popular culture, maintains that the Council of Trent ushered in a cultural dark age in Italy, snuffing out the spectacular creative production of the Renaissance. As a result, the decades following Trent have been mostly overlooked in Italian literary studies, in particular. The thirteen essays of Innovation in the Italian Counter-Reformation present a radical reconsideration of literary production in post-Tridentine Italy. With particular attention to the much-maligned tradition of spiritual literature, the volume’s contributors weave literary analysis together with religion, theater, art, music, science, and gender to demonstrate that the literature of this period not only merits study but is positively innovative. Contributors include such renowned critics as Virginia Cox and Amedeo Quondam, two of the leading scholars on the Italian Counter-Reformation.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

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Inventing the Renaissance

The Myth of a Golden Age

Ada Palmer

University of Chicago Press, 2025

WINNER OF THE HUGO AWARD

A New Yorker Best Book of 2025

An irreverent new take on the Renaissance, which reveals it as anything but Europe’s golden age.

From the darkness of a plagued and war-torn Middle Ages, the Renaissance (we’re told) heralds the dawning of a new world—a halcyon age of art, prosperity, and rebirth. Hogwash! or so says award-winning novelist and historian Ada Palmer. In Inventing the Renaissance, Palmer turns her witty and irreverent eye on the fantasies we’ve told ourselves about Europe’s not-so-golden age, myths she sets right with sharp clarity.

Palmer’s Renaissance is altogether desperate. Troubled by centuries of conflict, she argues, Europe looked to a long-lost Roman Empire (even its education practices) to save it from unending war. Later historians met their own political challenges with a similarly nostalgic vision, only now they looked to the Renaissance and told a partial story. To right this wrong, Palmer offers fifteen provocative portraits of Renaissance men and women (some famous, some obscure) whose lives reveal a far more diverse, fragile, and wild Renaissance than its glowing reputation suggests.

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Italian Art 1400-1500

Sources and Documents

Creighton Gilbert

Northwestern University Press, 1980

Creighton E. Gilbert captures the spirit of the early Renaissance in this remarkable collection of primary texts by and about artists of the fifteenth century. Italian Art makes a valuable contribution not only to the field of art history, but also to social and intellectual history. Almost all aspects of the life of the period—war, fashion, travel, communication—are documented. Revealing significant aspects of the practice of art, the process of patronage, and the way of life and social position of early Renaissance artists, Italian Art brings this fascinating period to life for students and scholars.

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Italian Chronicles

Raymond N. Stendhal

University of Minnesota Press, 2017

Nineteenth-century French writer Marie-Henri Beyle, better known by his pen name Stendhal, is one of the earliest leading practitioners of realism, his stories filled with sharp analyses of his characters’ psychology. This translation of Stendhal’s Chroniques italiennes is a collection of nine tales written between 1829 and 1840, many of which were published only after his death. Together these collected tales reveal a great novelist working with highly dramatic subject matter to forge a vision of life lived at its most intense.

The setting for these tales is a romanticized Italy, a place Stendhal viewed as unpolluted by bourgeois inhibitions and conformism. From the hothouse atmosphere of aristocratic convents to the horrors of the Cenci family, the tales in Italian Chronicles all feature passionate, transgressive characters engaged in “la chasse au bonheur”—the quest for happiness. Most of the tragic, violent tales are based on historical events, with Stendhal using history to validate his characters’ extreme behaviors as they battle literal and figurative oppression and try to break through to freedom.

Complete with revenge, bloody daggers, poisonings, and thick-walled nunneries, this new translation of Italian Chronicles includes four never-before-translated stories and a fascinating introduction detailing the origins of the book. It is sure to gratify established Stendhal fans as well as readers new to the writer.

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Italian Locations

Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema

Noa Steimatsky

University of Minnesota Press, 2008

Fascism and the Second World War left Italy indelibly changed, and cinema was arguably the art that most rigorously confronted the devastated nation. In this examination of four Italian filmmakers, Noa Steimatsky brilliantly maps their forceful negotiation of Italy’s identity and posits that the cinematic forms they employ constitute an imaginary reinhabiting of Italy-one that is inextricably linked with the political, physical, and symbolic predicament of reconstruction.

A dynamic intersection of pictorial and photographic, architectural and literary discourses inform Steimatsky’s revisionist interrogation of exemplary works from the 1940s to the mid–1960s. From the earliest documentary work of Michelangelo Antonioni on the River Po to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s re-siting of the Gospel in the arid, peripheral landscape of the Italian south, and from Roberto Rossellini’s tracing of a neorealist project in ruinous Berlin to Luchino Visconti’s wrought grandeur visited upon a humble Sicilian fishing village, Italian Locations probes the historical experience of displacement, anachronism, and a thoroughly contemporary anxiety in the cinematic arena.

For Steimatsky, Antonioni’s modernist achievement, informed by his native landscape, Rossellini’s neorealist image of Italy as a nation of ruins, Visconti’s reaching back to the nineteenth century and even more archaic pasts, and Pasolini’s ambivalence about modernity-all partake in a search for a politically and culturally redeemed Italy.

Noa Steimatsky is associate professor of the history of art and film studies at Yale University.

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Italian Political Cinema

Figures of the Long ’68

Mauro Resmini

University of Minnesota Press, 2022

An exploration of how film has made legible the Italian long ’68 as a moment of crisis and transition

Traditionally, the definition of political cinema assumes a relationship between cinema and politics. In contrast to this view, author Mauro Resmini sees this relationship as an impasse. To illustrate this theory, Resmini turns to Italian cinema to explore how films have reinvented the link between popular art and radical politics in Italy from 1968 to the early 1980s, a period of intense political and cultural struggles also known as the long ’68.

Italian Political Cinema conjures a multifaceted, complex portrayal of Italian society. Centered on emblematic figures in Italian cinema, it maps the currents of antagonism and repression that defined this period in the country’s history. Resmini explores how film imagined the possibilities, obstacles, and pitfalls that characterized the Italian long ’68 as a moment of crisis and transition. From workerism to autonomist Marxism to feminism, this book further expands the debate on political cinema with a critical interpretation of influential texts, some of which are currently only available in Italian.

A comprehensive and novel redefinition of political film, Italian Political Cinema introduces its audience to lesser-known directors alongside greats such as Pasolini, Bertolucci, Antonioni, and Bellocchio. Resmini offers access to untranslated work in Italian philosophy, political theory, and film theory, and forcefully advocates for the continued artistic and political relevance of these films in our time.

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