Product Description: Gomorrah, Roberto Saviano’s 2006 exposé of Naples’s Camorra mafia, was an international bestseller and became an award-winning film. But the death threats that followed forced the author into hiding. Saviano was ostracized by his countrymen and went on the run, changing his location every few months and compelled to keep perpetual company with his bodyguards...read more

Product Description: In this portrait of the flamboyant Milanese courtier Francesco Filelfo (1398-1481), Diana Robin reveals a fifteenth-century humanism different from the cool, elegant classicism of Medicean Florence and patrician Venice. Although Filelfo served such heads of state as Pope Pius II, Cosimo de' Medici, and Francesco Sforza, his humanism was that of the "other"--the marginalized, exilic writer, whose extraordinary mind yet obscure origins made him a misfit at court...read more

Giuseppe Mazzotta provides both a powerful framework for reading the Decameron and an important contribution to medieval and contemporary debates in esthetics Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Focuses on the family of Dow Sebastiano Sanna, the leading citizen of Nuoro, Sardinia, to examine how the approach of modernity mirrors the lives and deaths of the people of the town in the first decades of the twentieth-century

Product Description: Mastro-don Gesualdo è uno tra i più conosciuti romanzi di Giovanni Verga, pubblicato nel 1889. Narra la vicenda dell'omonimo protagonista, ed è ambientato a Vizzini, in Sicilia, nella prima metà dell'Ottocento in periodo risorgimentale...read more

A new translation of the fourteenth-century tales recounted by young citizens of Florence who have fled the city to escape the plague

Product Description: Three generations of fishermen conduct an epic struggle against nature, fate, and society in this moving tale by acclaimed realist writer Giovanni Verga. Written in 1881 and set in the Sicilian village of Aci Trezza during the 1860s, the novel recounts an impoverished family's attempts to pay off a crushing debt, to reclaim their lost boat and ancestral home, and to reunite their scattered clan...read more

The City of the Sun (Latin: Civitas Solis) is a philosophical work by the Italian philosopher Tommaso Campanella. It is an important early utopian work. The work was written during Campanella's imprisonment for heresy and sedition. The City of the Sun is presented as a dialogue between "a Grandmaster of the Knights Hospitaller and a Genoese Sea-Captain". It describes a theocratic society where goods, women and children are held in common. It also resembles the City of Adocentyn in the Picatrix, an Arabic grimoire of astrological magic. In the final part of the work, Campanella prophesies —in the veiled language of astrology— that the Spanish kings, in alliance with the Pope, are destined to be the instruments of a Divine Plan: the final victory of the True Faith and its diffusion in the whole world. Campanella held a his vision of a unified, peaceful world governed by a theocratic monarchy.

Product Description: Il romanzo narra la storia di una famiglia di pescatori che vive e lavora ad Aci Trezza, un piccolo paese siciliano nei pressi di Catania. Il romanzo ha un'impostazione corale, e rappresenta personaggi uniti dalla stessa cultura ma divisi dalle loro diverse scelte di vita, soverchiate comunque da un destino ineluttabile...read more

Product Description: First published in 1921, as part of the Cambridge Plain Texts series, this volume presents the complete text of Leopardi's Pensieri in the original Italian. A short editorial introduction in English is also included. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Leopardi and his works...read more

Book by Cheney

Product Description: Gomorrah, Roberto Saviano’s 2006 exposé of Naples’s Camorra mafia, was an international bestseller and became an award-winning film. But the death threats that followed forced the author into hiding. Saviano was ostracized by his countrymen and went on the run, changing his location every few months and compelled to keep perpetual company with his bodyguards...read more

Short description: "Cosima" tells the story of an aspiring writer growing up in Nuoro, Sardinia during the last decades of the nineteenth century when formal education for women was rare and literary careers unheard-of. Based on Deledda’s own life, the work describes a young woman’s struggle against the dismay and disapproval of her family and friends at her creative ambitions. Yet it also reads like a charming fable with details of family life, rural traditions and wild bandits, and it is as much a novel of memory as of character or action. Deledda’s characters are poor country folk driven by some predetermined force. Their loves are tragic, their lives as hard and as rigidly controlled as nature itself in the hills of Sardinia. Deledda creates memorable figures who play out their lives against this backdrop of mountains and bare plains, sheepfolds and vineyards. Shimmering in the distance is the sea and escape — for a few — to the Continent or America. In 1926 Grazia Deledda became the second woman and the second Italian to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. She wrote thirty-three novels, including "Reeds in the Wind," and many books of short stories, almost all set on Sardinia. Her work has become well known to English-speaking readers through Martha King’s translations for Italica Press.

Product Description: Universally recognized as Dante's early masterpiece, and including some of his best poetry outside the Divine Comedy, to which it can be regarded as a sort of prequelPart poetical tribute, part autobiography, it traces Dante's passionate love for Beatrice from his first meeting with her as a boy to her premature death at the age of 24 and the psychological and emotional turmoil that this caused him...read more

Product Description: Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron was the first great masterpiece of European storytelling; this brilliant new translation by J. G. Nichols faithfully captures its timeless vitality in readable and natural English.In the summer of 1348, with the plague ravaging Florence, ten young men and women take refuge in the countryside...read more

Product Description: "Pascal, a landowner fallen on hard times and trapped in a miserable marriage, runs away from home and wins a lot of money at the gaming tables in Monte Carlo. Meanwhile a body has been found in the millrace of his village and it is assumed that Pascal has killed himself...read more

An Italian novel of the postwar era in an English translation.

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) is universally celebrated as one of the greatest artists of all time, yet iconic Renaissance creator was also a prolific and gifted poet. This is a collection of verses which are devoted to love and religion.

The colorful memoirs of the legendary eighteenth-century lover recall not only his amorous exploits, but also his diverse careers as a gambler, businessman, diplomat, entertainer, politician, con artist, and world traveler.