My Two Italies

Download or read book My Two Italies written by Joseph Luzzi and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A child of Italian immigrants and scholar of Italian literature paints an intimate portrait that blends together history and the unusual to show how his 'two Italies' join and clash in unexpected ways.

Download or read book My Two Italies written by Joseph Luzzi and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A charming, informative personal history that blends the anecdotal, historical, and downright unusual The child of Italian immigrants and an award-winning scholar of Italian literature, in My Two Italies Joseph Luzzi straddles these two perspectives to link his family's dramatic story to Italy's north-south divide, its quest for a unifying language, and its passion for art, food, and family. From his Calabrian father's time as a military internee in Nazi Germany—where he had a love affair with a local Bavarian woman—to his adventures amid the Renaissance splendor of Florence, Luzzi creates a deeply personal portrait of Italy that leaps past facile clichés about Mafia madness and Tuscan sun therapy. He delves instead into why Italian Americans have such a complicated relationship with the "old country," and how Italy produces some of the world's most astonishing art while suffering from corruption, political fragmentation, and an enfeebled civil society. With topics ranging from the pervasive force of Dante's poetry to the meteoric rise of Silvio Berlusconi, Luzzi presents the Italians in all their glory and squalor, relating the problems that plague Italy today to the country's ancient roots. He shares how his "two Italies"—the earthy southern Italian world of his immigrant childhood and the refined "northern" Italian realm of his professional life—join and clash in unexpected ways that continue to enchant the many millions who are either connected to Italy by ancestry or bound to it by love.

Download or read book Stolen Figs written by Mark Rotella and published by North Point Press. This book was released on 2004-05-01 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An effortlessly artful blend of travel book, memoir, and affectionate portrait of a people Calabria is the toe of the boot that is Italy—a rugged peninsula where grapevines and fig and olive trees cling to the mountainsides during the scorching summers while the sea crashes against the cliffs on both coasts. Calabria is also a seedbed of Italian American culture; in North America, more people of Italian heritage trace their roots to Calabria than to almost any other region in Italy. Mark Rotella's Stolen Figs is a marvelous evocation of Calabria and Calabrians, whose way of life is largely untouched by the commerce that has made Tuscany and Umbria into international tourist redoubts. A grandson of Calabrian immigrants, Rotella persuades his father to visit the region for the first time in thirty years; once there, he meets Giuseppe, a postcard photographer who becomes his guide to all things Calabrian. As they travel around the region, Giuseppe initiates Rotella—and the reader—into its secrets: how to make soppressata and 'nduja, where to find hidden chapels and grottoes, and, of course, how to steal a fig without actually committing a crime. Stolen Figs is a model travelogue—at once charming and wise, and full of the earthy and unpretentious sense of life that, now as ever, characterizes Calabria and its people.

Download or read book Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy written by Joseph Luzzi and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-11-24 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking study considers Italian Romanticism and the modern myth of Italy. Ranging across European and international borders, he examines the metaphors, facts, and fictions about Italy that were born in the Romantic age and continue to haunt the global literary imagination.

Download or read book In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love written by Joseph Luzzi and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2015-06-02 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A story of love and grief. ‘I became a widower and a father on the same day’ says Joseph Luzzi. His book tells how Dante’s ‘The Divine Comedy’ helped him to endure his grief, raise their infant daughter, and rediscover love.

Download or read book Italians written by Luigi Barzini and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1996-07-03 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the character and history of the Italian people.

Download or read book Every Day in Tuscany written by Frances Mayes and published by Random House Digital, Inc.. This book was released on 2010 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A recipe-complemented work continues the author's tribute to the region of Tuscany and its people, tracing the course of a year during which she renovated a thirteenth-century house in the mountains above Cortona.