This category focuses on books about Italy, including novels, Italy memoirs, and guidebooks.
More book recommendations:
Have you seen this book? Many years ago, I found this book while browsing the clearance stacks at a used bookstore in Washington, DC. Published in 1990, Gli Alberi Monumentali d’Italia is a beautiful coffee table book full of color photos of legendary trees from Italy’s islands and central/southern regions. Roman pines, Holm oaks, olive,…
What you need to know about smoking in Italy, from laws to etiquette.
In the late winter/early spring of 1948, American playwright Tennessee Williams arrived in Rome in need of a change of scenery. Williams, of course, is known for his writing set in the American South, including “A Streetcar Named Desire” (written in 1947) and “Cat On A Hot Tin Roof” (1955), both of which earned him Pulitzer…
If you know me, you’ll know that I am nuts about religious relics. And if you know David Farley’s book “An Irreverent Curiosity,” you’ll know immediately why that first line is a wee bit funny. I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Farley in Manhattan to discuss his book, which has the tag…
New Moon, the second book in the Twilight series, has some scenes set in the Tuscan town of Volterra. Learn more about Volterra, including its vampire tour.
The Monster of Florence is a true crime tale about a serial killer who terrorized the Tuscan hills around Florence for almost 20 years.
Last November, the New York Review of Books released Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio under its NYRB Classics imprint. The tale, as reviewed by Tim Parks in the latest issue, is much darker than the Disneyfied version. After the jump is Parks’ full review. As always, I urge you to subscribe to NYRB; they…
Farewell to Christopher Hibbert, whose biographies of Rome and the Medici family established him as one of the foremost authorities on Italy’s history.
I am supremely excited about two new nonfiction books this summer: The Monster of Florence and Rome 1960. Both books describe tumultuous times in central Italy. The first is a period of time in Florence when an unknown predator (or predators) “stalked lovers’ lanes in the countryside.” The second goes in-depth about the 1960 Olympic…
Salman Rushdie imagines Renaissance Florence in his new book “The Enchantress of Florence.”
Just in time for late spring and summer romps around Italy comes the reissue of Edith Wharton’s 1904 landscaping classic Italian Villas and Their Gardens.
In case you missed it yesterday, WAMU-NPR’s Diane Rehm hosted a one-hour book talk on The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli. If you need a refresher on this classic, want to hear new perspectives, or simply are interested in learning more about this “classic treatise on leadership and power,” you can listen to the show above…
You can blame my postman for me being a little slow on reporting about the excellent Rome-related book reviews in the October 11th issue of the New York Review of Books. When I happened upon Ingrid Rowland’s review of four books – Rome from the Ground Up; The Seven Hills of Rome: A Geographical Tour…
Affreschi: Exploring Etruria is the only travel book I know that focuses on the land of the Etruscans, also known as Etruria. Before the Romans came along, the Etruscans ruled a wide domain, which stretched from Rome to southern Tuscany and east to Umbria. Author Mary Jane Cryan profiles these areas, including the towns of…