In 1462 Pope Pius II performed the only reverse canonization in history, publicly damning a living man. The target was Sigismondo Malatesta, Lord of Rimini and a patron of the arts with ties to the Florentine Renaissance. Condemned to an afterlife of torment, he was burned in effigy in several places in Rome. What had this cultivated nobleman done to merit such a fate?
Pagan Virtue in a Christian World examines anew the contributions and contradictions of the Italian Renaissance, and in particular how the recovery of Greek and Roman literature and art led to a revival of pagan culture and morality in fifteenth-century Italy. The court of Sigismondo Malatesta (1417–1468), Anthony D’Elia shows, provides a case study in the Renaissance clash of pagan and Christian values, for Sigismondo was nothing if not flagrant in his embrace of the classical past. Poets likened him to Odysseus, hailed him as a new Jupiter, and proclaimed his immortal destiny. Sigismondo incorporated into a Christian church an unprecedented number of zodiac symbols and images of the Olympian gods and goddesses and had the body of the Greek pagan theologian Plethon buried there.
In the literature and art that Sigismondo commissioned, pagan virtues conflicted directly with Christian doctrine. Ambition was celebrated over humility, sexual pleasure over chastity, muscular athleticism over saintly asceticism, and astrological fortune over providence. In the pagan themes so prominent in Sigismondo’s court, D’Elia reveals new fault lines in the domains of culture, life, and religion in Renaissance Italy.
The Pantheon in Rome is one of the grand architectural statements of all ages. This richly illustrated book isolates the reasons for its extraordinary impact on Western architecture, discussing the Pantheon as a building in its time but also as a building for all time.
Mr. MacDonald traces the history of the structure since its completion and examines its progeny--domed rotundas with temple-fronted porches built from the second century to the twentieth--relating them to the original. He analyzes the Pantheon's design and the details of its technology and construction, and explores the meaning of the building on the basis of ancient texts, formal symbolism, and architectural analogy. He sees the immense unobstructed interior, with its disk of light that marks the sun's passage through the day, as an architectural metaphor for the ecumenical pretensions of the Roman Empire.
Past discussions of the Pantheon have tended to center on design and structure. These are but the starting point for Mr. MacDonald, who goes on to show why it ranks--along with Cheops's pyramid, the Parthenon, Wren's churches, Mansard's palaces-as an architectural archetype.
A generation of Italian authors dedicated their lives, their works, and their voices to the primary driving force behind twentieth-century narratives of World War II. Renata Viganò was an active member of the Italian Resistance during World War II, and, like many of her male counterparts, she depicted the actions of the brave people who contributed to and participated in the partisan movement. Unlike her counterparts, however, Viganò vividly portrayed the experiences of women, notably women on the front line, in her posthumously published Matrimonio in brigata, here translated for the first time in English as Partisan Wedding.
"If it had not been for them, the women . . . who got used to `men's business,' . . . the partisan army would have lost a vital, necessary force." The women in Partisan Wedding joined the struggle for many reasons; some for their husbands, others for their fathers, brothers, or sons; some for a sense of justice and the desire to do what was right. Whatever the cause, Viganò demonstrates that women maintained the ability to nurture and to care, to preserve their female qualities in the face of war.
Because of her own role as a partisan, the stories in Partisan Wedding are based on Viganò's personal experiences. Two stories in the collection are specifically autobiographical: "Acquitted" and "My Resistance." Relating her own plight to find her husband, a partisan commander, after his sudden arrest, "Acquitted" aptly conveys Viganò's struggle to maintain her strength in the face of complete helplessness. "My Resistance" is a personal account of her own experiences during the war and the women she met along the way.
Partisan Wedding is an invaluable contribution to the literature of the Second World War, completing the picture of those involved in the struggle for freedom. Viganò's remarkable prose, equally beautiful and terrible in its description of the minute details of human suffering and sacrifice, opens a window to a world that has rarely been seen, and a world not easily forgotten.
A New Statesman Book of the Year
Winner of the Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize
Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies
“Extraordinary…I could not put it down.”
—Margaret MacMillan
“Reveals how ideology corrupts the truth, how untrammeled ambition destroys the soul, and how the vanity of white male supremacy distorts emotion, making even love a matter of state.”
—Sonia Purnell, author of A Woman of No Importance
When Attilio Teruzzi, a decorated military officer and early convert to the Fascist cause, married a rising American opera star, his good fortune seemed settled. The wedding was blessed by Mussolini himself. Yet only three years later, Teruzzi, now commander of the Black Shirts, renounced his wife. Lilliana was Jewish, and fascist Italy would soon introduce its first race laws.
The Perfect Fascist pivots from the intimate story of a tempestuous courtship and inconvenient marriage to the operatic spectacle of Mussolini’s rise and fall. It invites us to see in the vain, unscrupulous, fanatically loyal Attilio Teruzzi an exemplar of fascism’s New Man. Victoria De Grazia’s landmark history shows how the personal was always political in the fascist quest for manhood and power. In his self-serving pieties and intimate betrayals, his violence and opportunism, Teruzzi is a forefather of the illiberal politicians of today.
“The brilliance of de Grazia’s book lies in the way that she has made a page-turner of Teruzzi’s chaotic life, while providing a scholarly and engrossing portrait of the two decades of Fascist rule.”
—Caroline Moorhead, Wall Street Journal
“Original and important…A probing analysis of the fascist ‘strong man.’ De Grazia’s attention to Teruzzi’s private life, his behavior as suitor and husband, deepens and enriches our understanding of the nature of leadership in Mussolini’s regime and of masculinity, virility, and honor in Italian fascist culture.”
—Robert O. Paxton, author of The Anatomy of Fascism
“This is a perfect book!…Its two entwined narratives—one political and public, the other personal and private—help us understand why the personal is political for those who insist on reshaping people and society.”
—Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran
In this beautifully illustrated book Maria Antonella Pelizzari traces the history of photography in Italy from its beginnings to the present as she guides us through the history of Italy and its ancient sites and Renaissance landmarks.
Pelizzari specifically considers the role of photography in the formation of Italian national identity during times of political struggle, such as the lead up to Unification in 1860, and later in the nationalist wars of Mussolini’s regime. While many Italians and foreigners— such as Fratelli Alinari or Carlo Ponti, John Ruskin or Kit Talbot—focused their lenses on architectural masterpieces, others documented the changing times and political heroes, creating icons of figures such as Garibaldi and the brigands. Pelizzari’s exploration of Italian visual traditions also includes the photographic collages of Bruno Munari, the neorealist work of photographers such as Franco Pinna, the bold stylized compositions of Mario Giacomelli, and the controversial images created by Oliviero Toscani for Benetton advertising in the 1980s.
Featuring unpublished works and a rare selection of over one hundred images, this book will appeal to art collectors and students of art history and Italian culture.
The Piazza San Marco, one of the most famous and instantly recognizable townscapes in the West, if not the world, has been described as a stage set, as Europe’s drawing room, as a painter’s canvas. This book traces the changing shape and function of the piazza, from its beginnings in the ninth century to its present day ubiquity in the Venetian, European, as well as global imagination.
Through its long history, the Piazza San Marco has functioned as civic space that was used for such varied activities as public meetings; animal-baiting; executions; state processions; meat and produce markets; a performance venue for rock concerts; as well as, more recently, a cafe to enjoy a leisurely Campari. Constantly alert to the question of function, this book recreates not only rituals of the past but also activities of the present, from the coronation of the doge to the legendary Pink Floyd concert of 1989, with much fanfare in between. Iain Fenlon recreates the dynamic, colorful, and noisy history of the piazza—a history that is also the history of Venice and, indeed, of Europe.
Poggio Civitate in Murlo, Tuscany, is home to one of the best-preserved Etruscan communities of the eighth through the sixth centuries BCE. In this book, Anthony Tuck, the director of excavations, provides a broad synthesis of decades of data from the site.
The results of many years of excavation at Poggio Civitate tell a story of growth, urbanization, ancient industrialization, and dissolution. The site preserves traces of aristocratic domestic buildings, including some of the most evocative and enigmatic architectural sculpture in the region, along with remnants of non-elite domestic spaces, enabling illuminating comparisons across social strata. The settlement also features evidence of large-scale production systems, including tools and other objects that reflect the daily experiences of laborers. Finally, the site contains the story of its own destruction. Tuck finds in the data clear indications that Poggio Civitate was methodically dismantled, and he posits hypotheses concerning the circumstances around this violent social and political act.
The first full-length study of Francesco Patrizi—the most important political philosopher of the Italian Renaissance before Machiavelli—who sought to reconcile conflicting claims of liberty and equality in the service of good governance.
At the heart of the Italian Renaissance was a longing to recapture the wisdom and virtue of Greece and Rome. But how could this be done? A new school of social reformers concluded that the best way to revitalize corrupt institutions was to promote an ambitious new form of political meritocracy aimed at nurturing virtuous citizens and political leaders.
The greatest thinker in this tradition of virtue politics was Francesco Patrizi of Siena, a humanist philosopher whose writings were once as famous as Machiavelli’s. Patrizi wrote two major works: On Founding Republics, addressing the enduring question of how to reconcile republican liberty with the principle of merit; and On Kingship and the Education of Kings, which lays out a detailed program of education designed to instill the qualities necessary for political leadership—above all, practical wisdom and sound character.
The first full-length study of Patrizi’s life and thought in any language, Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy argues that Patrizi is a thinker with profound lessons for our time. A pioneering advocate of universal literacy who believed urban planning could help shape civic values, he concluded that limiting the political power of the wealthy, protecting the poor from debt slavery, and reducing the political independence of the clergy were essential to a functioning society. These ideas were radical in his day. Far more than an exemplar of his time, Patrizi deserves to rank alongside the great political thinkers of the Renaissance: Machiavelli, Thomas More, and Jean Bodin.
When workmen excavating the ruins of Pompeii eagerly gathered the native medicinal plants growing there, Wilhelmina Jashemski discovered that this was another example of the continuity of life in the shadow of Vesuvius. Many of the plants used for herbal medicine around Pompeii today are the same ones that ancient authorities such as Pliny the Elder and Dioscorides recommended for treating the same types of disorders.
In this book, Jashemski presents an herbal of thirty-six medicinal plants, most of them known to the ancients and still employed today. She describes each plant's contemporary medicinal uses and compares them to ancient practices as recorded in literary sources. Scientific, English, and Italian names and the plant's mythological associations complete the entries, while elegant, full-page portraits depict each plant visually.
In AD 79, Mt. Vesuvius erupted in two stages. While the first stage was incredibly destructive, it was the second stage, a so-called pyroclastic flow, that inundated Pompeii with a combination of superheated gases, pumice, and rocks, killing tens of thousands of people and animals and burying them in ash and mud.
During excavations of the town in 1863, Giuseppe Fiorelli, the director of the dig, poured plaster of paris into a cavity under the soil revealed by a workman's pick. When the plaster set and the mound was uncovered, all were amazed to see the secret that the ground had held for 1,800 years: a detailed cast of an ancient Pompeian such as no one had seen before, frozen in the instant of dying and complete in every respect, including outlines of the clothes he was wearing at the time of the destruction. The bodies, photographed and exhibited in the specially built Pompeii Museum, completely changed the world's ideas of life in ancient Italy.
Pompeii's Living Statues is a narrative account, supported by contemporary documents, of the remarkable discovery of those ancient victims preserved in the volcanic mud of Vesuvius.
Eugene Dwyer examines these casts and related records, the originals of a number of which (along with their museum) were lost in World War II bombing. As he considers the casts as archaeological and cultural pieces, he also discusses Pompeii and its artifacts in the context of Italian unification and party politics, the development of modern excavation methods, and the challenges of maintaining a very large archaeological site. Dwyer's clear organization and writing style, combined with a collection of photographs and engravings, make for a fascinating exploration of Pompeii and its victims.
This study of Renaissance adventures and struggles against fate brings to life a brilliant age and its exemplars. It is a story of how several men, including Julius II, worked, intrigued, and made business deals against the backdrop of an Italy invaded by continental countries and England. The future of the once great Republic of Venice was at stake as it was besieged and in desperate need of allies. The Papacy switched sides, breaking the seemingly invincible and mostly foreign League of Cambrai, and saw that Venice was offered a loan by Agostino Chigi, the richest man of his time. The Pope's banker, as daring as Julius II, negotiated with the formidable communal rulers of Venice and Italy was kept from further dismemberment.
As a dramatic account that brings together diplomacy, war, business, and politics, viewed through one long entrepreneurial venture, this book is unique. It juxtaposes differing institutional structures and the various political ways among Italy's city states; it also brings into sharp focus the new men of the Renaissance. Their dealings and lifestyles were original and bold. They were successful against great odds and flaunted their new wealth and position in society in building great palaces and estates and becoming patrons of art. Felix Gilbert is a master teacher of history, and his new work is as luminous as the men and events he tells about.
The most complete translation available of these brief biographies of great European figures, written by one of the leading historians of the sixteenth century.
Portraits of Learned Men provides a fascinating synopsis of the contours, mentality, and trajectory of humanistic culture in Italy and Europe by one of the leading historians of the sixteenth century, Paolo Giovio (1483–1552). These brief biographies of 146 men of learning—from Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio in the fourteenth century to Erasmus, Thomas More, and Juan Luis Vives in the sixteenth—were meant to accompany accurate portrait paintings commemorating great figures in modern history. Presented together with the literary portraits in this volume, these paintings would be located in a purpose-built villa on Lake Como that would be open to the public. Giovio called this his musaeum, or home of the Muses, one of the first such institutions in European history. His museum would not only serve the traditional function of inspiring virtuous emulation but also provide a comprehensive, candid, and personal overview of the Republic of Letters as it had taken shape and flourished in Italy and Europe during the Renaissance.
This volume contains a fresh edition of the Latin text and a new, more complete translation than any now available in English.
At the age of twenty-five, Primo Levi was sent to Hell. Levi, an Italian chemist from Turin, was one of many swept up in the Holocaust of World War II and sent to die in the German concentration camp in Auschwitz. Of the 650 people transported to the camp in his group, only 15 men and 9 women survived. After Soviet liberation of the camp in 1945, Levi wrote books, essays, short stories, poetry, and a novel, in which he painstakingly described the horrors of his experience at Auschwitz. He also spent the rest of his life struggling with the fact that he was not among those who were killed.
In Primo Levi and the Politics of Survival, Frederic D. Homer looks at Primo Levi's life but, more important, shows him to be a significant political philosopher. In the course of his writings, Levi asked and answered his most haunting question: can someone be brutalized by a terrifying experience and, upon return to "ordinary life," recover from the physical and moral destruction he has suffered? Levi used this question to develop a philosophy positing that although man is no match for life, he can become better prepared to contend with the tragedies in life.
According to Levi, the horrors of the world occur because of the strength of human tendencies, which make relationships between human beings exceedingly fragile. He believed that we are ill-constituted beings who have tendencies toward violence and domination, dividing ourselves into Us and Them, with very shallow loyalties. He also maintained that our only refuge is in education and responsibility, which may counter these tendencies. Homer calls Levi's philosophy "optimistic pessimism."
As Homer demonstrates, Levi took his past experiences into account to determine that goodwill and democratic institutions do not come easily to people. Liberal society is to be earned through discipline and responsibility toward our weaknesses. Levi's answer is "civilized liberalism." To achieve this we must counter some of our most stubborn tendencies.
Homer also explores the impact of Levi's death, an apparent suicide, on the way in which his work and theories have been perceived. While several critics discount Levi's work because of the nature of his death, Homer argues that his death is consistent with his philosophy. A book rich in brutally honest philosophy, Primo Levi and the Politics of Survival compels one to look at serious questions about life, tragedy, optimism, solidarity, violence, and human nature.
Defining the proper female body, seeking elective surgery for beauty, enjoying lavish spa treatments, and combating impotence might seem like today’s celebrity infatuations. However, these preoccupations were very much alive in the early modern period. Valeria Finucci recounts the story of a well-known patron of arts and music in Renaissance Italy, Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua (1562–1612), to examine the culture, fears, and captivations of his times. Using four notorious moments in Vincenzo’s life, Finucci explores changing concepts of sexuality, reproduction, beauty, and aging.
The first was Vincenzo’s inability to consummate his earliest marriage and subsequent medical inquiry, which elucidates new concepts of female anatomy. Second, Vincenzo’s interactions with Bolognese doctor Gaspare Tagliacozzi, the “father of plastic surgery,” illuminate contemporary fascinations with elective procedures. Vincenzo’s use of thermal spas explores the proliferation of holistic, noninvasive therapies to manage pain, detoxify, and rehabilitate what the medicine of the time could not address. And finally, Vincenzo’s search for a cure for impotence later in life analyzes masculinity and aging.
By examining letters, doctors’ advice, reports, receipts, and travelogues, together with (and against) medical, herbal, theological, even legal publications of the period, Finucci describes an early modern cultural history of the pathology of human reproduction, the physiology of aging, and the science of rejuvenation as they affected a prince with a large ego and an even larger purse. In doing so, she deftly marries salacious tales with historical analysis to tell a broader story of Italian Renaissance cultural adjustments and obsessions.
In 1482, the Florentine humanist and statesman Francesco Berlinghieri produced the Geographia, a book of over one hundred folio leaves describing the world in Italian verse, inspired by the ancient Greek geography of Ptolemy. The poem, divided into seven books (one for each day of the week the author “travels” the known world), is interleaved with lavishly engraved maps to accompany readers on this journey.
Sean Roberts demonstrates that the Geographia represents the moment of transition between printing and manuscript culture, while forming a critical base for the rise of modern cartography. Simultaneously, the use of the Geographia as a diplomatic gift from Florence to the Ottoman Empire tells another story. This exchange expands our understanding of Mediterranean politics, European perceptions of the Ottomans, and Ottoman interest in mapping and print. The envoy to the Sultan represented the aspirations of the Florentine state, which chose not to bestow some other highly valued good, such as the city’s renowned textiles, but instead the best example of what Florentine visual, material, and intellectual culture had to offer.
Explores the way Italian women writers craft identities through writing.
In this important volume, Graziella Parati examines the ways in which Italian women writers articulate their identities through autobiography—a public act that is also the creation of a private life. Considering autobiographical writings by five women writers from the seventeenth century to the present, Parati draws important connections between self-writing and the debate over women’s roles, both traditional and transgressive.
Parati considers the first prose autobiography written by an Italian woman -Camilla Faà Gonzaga’s 1622 memoir—as her beginning point, citing it as a central “pre-text.” In her memoir, Gonzaga makes explicit her conflict over the public silence imposed on her, yet succeeds in writing herself into history through self-narrative. Parati then examines Enif Robert’s autobiography, in which Robert strives to enter the public sphere of the post-World War I futurist movement by writing about her fight to overcome cancer of the uterus. Next, Parati considers Fausta Cialente’s life story, an account of her family's life in Trieste from World War I through the fascist era, as well as the narrative in which Rita Levi Montalcini describes her life as a woman, a Nobel-Prize winning scientist, and a Jew who lived under fascism in the thirties and forties. Finally, Parati analyzes Luisa Passerini's look back on her involvement with the student movement of 1968. Through her discussion of these women’s writings, Parati demonstrates the complex negotiations over identity contained within them, negotiations that challenge dichotomies between male and female, maternal and paternal, and private and public. Public History, Private Stories is a compelling exploration of the disparate identities created by these women through the act of writing autobiography.Even the most comprehensive Renaissance histories have neglected the vibrant groups of women writers that emerged in cities across Italy during the mid-1500s—and the thriving network of printers, publishers, and agents that specialized in producing and selling their books. In Publishing Women, Diana Robin finally brings to life this story of women’s cultural and intellectual leadership in early modern Italy, illuminating the factors behind—and the significance of—their sudden dominance.
Focusing on the collective publication process, Robin portrays communities in Naples, Venice, Rome, Siena, and Florence, where women engaged in activities that ranged from establishing literary salons to promoting religious reform. Her innovative cultural history considers the significant roles these women played in tandem with men, rather than separated from them. In doing so, it collapses the borders between women’s history, Renaissance and Reformation studies, and book history to evoke a historical moment that catapulted women’s writings and women-sponsored books into the public sphere for the first time anywhere in Europe.
Italian preachers during the Reformation era found themselves in the trenches of a more desperate war than anything they had ever imagined. This war—the splintering of western Christendom into conflicting sects—was physically but also spiritually violent. In an era of tremendous religious convolution, fluidity, and danger, preachers of all kinds spoke from the pulpit daily, weekly, or seasonally to confront the hottest controversies of their time. Preachers also turned to the printing press in unprecedented numbers to spread their messages.
Emily Michelson challenges the stereotype that Protestants succeeded in converting Catholics through superior preaching and printing. Catholic preachers were not simply reactionary and uncreative mouthpieces of a monolithic church. Rather, they deftly and imaginatively grappled with the question of how to preserve the orthodoxy of their flock and maintain the authority of the Roman church while also confronting new, undeniable lay demands for inclusion and participation.
These sermons—almost unknown in English until now—tell a new story of the Reformation that credits preachers with keeping Italy Catholic when the region’s religious future seemed uncertain, and with fashioning the post-Reformation Catholicism that thrived into the modern era. By deploying the pulpit, pen, and printing press, preachers in Italy created a new religious culture that would survive in an unprecedented atmosphere of competition and religious choice.
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