Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, celebrated Italian goldsmith (1500-1571), in which Cellini tells the story of his life and art and also depicts the manners and morals of both the rulers and their subjects in 16th Century Italy. This new edition includes new notes on the text and a chronology.

A collection of twenty stories that are both melancholy and funny, farce and fantasy. It charts the struggles of an Italian peasant to reconcile country habits with urban life, combining comical disasters with a surrealistic view of city life through the eyes of an outsider.

Packed with facts, attributions, and entertaining anecdotes about his contemporaries, Vasari's collection of biographical accounts also presents a highly influential theory of the development of Renaissance art. Beginning with Cimabue and Giotto, who represent the infancy of art, Vasari considers the period of youthful vigour, shaped by Donatello, Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, and Masaccio, before ...

In a secret grotto in a mountain cave two young lovers dead fifty years ago and still embracing are watched over by a life-size terracotta dog. Montalbano's passion to solve this old crime takes him, heedless of personal danger, on a journey through the island's past and into a family's dark heart amid the horrors of World War II.

A masterwork of Italian literature.

The land where lemons bloom was already a fascinating travel destination long before Goethe identified it as such. The grand culture and varied landscapes of Italy have attracted and inspired artists and writers of every epoch.

Now in its seventh edition, Basic Italian is a mainstream text that offers communicative-based activities, shortened dialogues and updated vocabulary and cultural notes.

The goats of Vigata once grazed on the trash-strewn site still known as the Pasture. Now local enterprise of a different sort flourishes: drug dealers and prostitutes of every flavour. But their discreet trade is upset when two employees of the Splendour Refuse Collection Company discover the body of engineer Silvio Luparello...

The author of The Name of the Rose considers a wide range of topics, from Superman and Casablanca , Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni, Jim Jones and mass suicide, and Woody Allen, to pop festivals and football, and not least the social and personal implications of tight jeans.

This guide will help the reader to start speaking Italian quickly and easily. It includes practical lessons, cultural facts and references, a dictionary, common verb lists and an audio CD for practical listening exercises.

A collection of eight stories which have been selected as being representative of contemporary Italian writing.

A new edition of one of the classics of twentieth century literature. Young Givanni Drogo arrives at the bleak border area of the Tartar Steppe where he is to take a short assignment at Fort Bastiani, an encampment manned by veterans who have grown old without seeing a trace of the enemy. As his length of service stretches from months into years, he continues to wait patiently for the enemy. ...

A triptych of novels in one volume. Viscount Medardo is bisected by a cannonball on the plains of Bohemia; Baron Cosimo, aged 12, retires to the trees for the rest of his days; and Charlemagne's knight, Agiluf, is an empty suit of armour.

Over a period of 27 years, the author created in this poem a world situated between fantasy and reality: a kaleidoscope of fabulous adventures, monsters, barbaric splendour and romance, all tempered by the unifying personality of the author - his humour and serenity, his humanity and moderation.

Shows you how the language is spoken and written in Italy. This work gives you: correct usage in the appropriate situations - formal, colloquial, popular, and familiar; the additions to Italian vocabulary, including language dealing with e-mail and the Internet; and examples from Italian newspapers, novels, publications, and other media.

A collection of Sciascia's stories, brief and haunting: the realist tradition at its best. In one tale, a couple of men talk, cynically yet earnestly, about the etymology of the word 'mafia'; the reader comes to realise that he is eavesdropping on the mustings of a mafia boss and his underling.

Using the mechanisms of fables, this work focuses with precision on human reality. Nature in these stories has a magical quality in the flight of a crow, the iridescent track of a snail, the sideways leap of a stray cat - but the magic can encompass both enchantment and terror.