For the Love of Italy

For the Love of Italy
Author: Marella Caracciolo Chia
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2010
Genre: Agritourism
ISBN: 0307452484

From grand views and romantic hillside villas to sprawling gardens and alfresco dinners, Italy offers its most authentic self through its landscape and its food. For the Love of Italy celebrates Italy's countryside and the farm-to-table movement with vivid profiles and luscious photography of twenty-two spectacular agriturismi, or hospitable farming estates. Each is inextricably connected to the Italian agricultural tradition and to the most simple of daily routines and pleasures. All will delight visitors with lovely accommodations and unforgettable graciousness. Marella Caracciolo, who has written extensively about travel in Italy from both sides of the Atlantic, and renowned photographer Oberto Gili present a sensual journey in this evocative collection of diverse landscapes, unmatched architecture, and local gastronomic traditions. One can stay at a Renaissance villa estate with breathtaking views, where biodynamic wine is produced, or at a unique luxury hotel in the prehistoric dwellings of Basilicata, where visitors sleep, bathe, and eat by candlelight. Families visiting Villa la Foce and the nearby thirteenth-century farmhouse in southern Tuscany, will discover exquisite gardens, a swimming pool, a tree house--and meals inspired by the bounty of the enormous vegetable garden and orchards. Caracciolo describes in transporting prose the colorful history and seasonal rhythms of these and nineteen other estates. And in Gili's photography the interiors, architecture, and gardens unfold with charm and grace. Whether one wants to learn traditional pasta making, sip Brunello right where it's made, or wander an ancient orangerie and then take a nap, these delightful farms promise unique and spectacular trips--or the fantasy of one. With a resource section that will be indispensable for anyone planning a trip to an agriturismo, For the Love of Italy is a portrait of an irresistible country and an enviable way of life.

La Passione

La Passione
Author: Dianne Hales
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2019-04-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0451499182

A jubilant celebration of Italy’s outsize impact on culture, from literature to art, music to movies, that “masterfully examines the multitude of reasons why so many people fall in love with Italy and the Italian lifestyle” (Forbes) Can you imagine painting without Leonardo, opera without Verdi, fashion without Armani, food without the signature tastes of pasta, gelato, and pizza? The first universities, first banks, first public libraries? All Italian. New York Times bestselling author Dianne Hales attributes these landmark achievements to la passione italiana, a primal force that stems from an insatiable hunger to discover and create; to love and live with every fiber of one's being. This fierce drive, millennia in the making, blazes to life in the Sistine Chapel, surges through a Puccini aria, deepens a vintage Brunello, and rumbles in a gleaming Ferrari engine. Our ideal tour guide, Hales sweeps readers along on her adventurous quest for the secrets of la passione. She swims in the playgrounds of mythic gods, shadows artisanal makers of chocolate and cheese, joins in Sicily’s Holy Week traditions, celebrates a neighborhood Carnevale in Venice, and explores pagan temples, vineyards, silk mills, movie sets, crafts studios, and fashion salons. She introduces us, through sumptuous prose, to unforgettable Italians, historical and contemporary, all brimming with the greatest of Italian passions—for life itself. A lyrical portrait of a spirit as well as a nation, La Passione appeals to the Italian in all our souls, inspiring us to be as daring as Italy’s gladiators, as eloquent as its poets, as alluring as its beauties, and as irresistible as its lovers. Praise for La Passione “[An] effervescent love letter to all things Italian.”—Newsday “In this sweeping account of la passione italiana from ancient to modern times, Dianne Hales shows once again why she is one the world’s foremost guides to the riches of Italian culture. Every page resonates with the author’s love for Italy and her joy in sharing its remarkable discoveries and exquisite pleasures with her readers.” —Joseph Luzzi, author of My Two Italies and In a Dark Wood “Hales takes us on an enriching and delightful journey, filled with fascinating characters, scintillating sensual details, and an authentic connection to the ever-inspiring Italian heart and soul that has given the world boundless pleasures.” —Susan Van Allen, author of 100 Places in Italy Every Woman Should Go

Pleasure

Pleasure
Author: Gabriele D'Annunzio
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2013-07-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0143106740

Putting the sex back in Pleasure, here is the first new English translation since the Victorian era of the great Italian masterpiece of sensuality and seduction Like Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Andrea Sperelli lives his life as a work of art, seeking beauty and flouting the rules of morality and social interaction along the way. In his aristocratic circles in Rome, he is a serial seducer. But there are two women who command his special regard: the beautiful young widow Elena, and the pure, virgin-like Maria. In Andrea’s pursuit of the exalted heights of extreme pleasure, he plays them against each other, spinning a sadistic web of lust and deceit. This new translation of D’Annunzio’s masterpiece, the first in more than one hundred years, restores what was considered too offensive to be included in the 1898 translation—some of the very scenes that are key to the novel’s status as a landmark of literary decadence. For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

I Modi

I Modi
Author: Lynne Lawner
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 156
Release: 1988
Genre: Art
ISBN:

Consuming Pleasures

Consuming Pleasures
Author: Daniel Horowitz
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 505
Release: 2012-03-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812206495

How is it that American intellectuals, who had for 150 years worried about the deleterious effects of affluence, more recently began to emphasize pleasure, playfulness, and symbolic exchange as the essence of a vibrant consumer culture? The New York intellectuals of the 1930s rejected any serious or analytical discussion, let alone appreciation, of popular culture, which they viewed as morally questionable. Beginning in the 1950s, however, new perspectives emerged outside and within the United States that challenged this dominant thinking. Consuming Pleasures reveals how a group of writers shifted attention from condemnation to critical appreciation, critiqued cultural hierarchies and moralistic approaches, and explored the symbolic processes by which individuals and groups communicate. Historian Daniel Horowitz traces the emergence of these new perspectives through a series of intellectual biographies. With writers and readers from the United States at the center, the story begins in Western Europe in the early 1950s and ends in the early 1970s, when American intellectuals increasingly appreciated the rich inventiveness of popular culture. Drawing on sources both familiar and newly discovered, this transnational intellectual history plays familiar works off each other in fresh ways. Among those whose work is featured are Jürgen Habermas, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Walter Benjamin, C. L. R. James, David Riesman and Marshall McLuhan, Richard Hoggart, members of London's Independent Group, Stuart Hall, Paddy Whannel, Tom Wolfe, Herbert Gans, Susan Sontag, Reyner Banham, and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

The Italian Lover

The Italian Lover
Author: Robert Hellenga
Publisher: Little, Brown
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2007-09-24
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0316026301

An exhilarating novel of romance, art, and food in Florence, featuring the beloved Margot Harrington, who graced Robert Hellenga's The Sixteen Pleasures. Margot Harrington's memoir about her discovery in Florence of a priceless masterwork of Renaissance erotica -- and the misguided love affair it inspired - is now, 25 years later, being made into a movie. Margot, with the help of her lover, Woody, writes a script that she thinks will validate her life. Of course their script is not used, but never mind -- happy endings are the best endings for movies, as Margot eventually comes to see. At the former convent in Florence where The Sixteen Pleasures -- now called The Italian Lover - - is being filmed, Margot enters into a drama she never imagined, where her ideas of home, love, art, and aging collide with the imperatives of commerce and the unknowability of other cultures and other people.

Marcus of Umbria

Marcus of Umbria
Author: Justine van der Leun
Publisher: Rodale Books
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2010-06-08
Genre: Pets
ISBN: 1605290998

Readers will delight in this tale of an urbanite who leaves her magazine job to move to Collelungo, Italy, population: 200. There, in the ancient city center of a historic Umbrian village, she sets up house with the enticing local gardener she met on vacation only weeks earlier. This impulsive decision launches an eye-opening series of misadventures when village life and romance turn out to be radically different from what she had imagined. Love lost with the gardener is found instead with Marcus, an abandoned English pointer that she rescues. With Marcus by her side, Justine discovers the bliss and hardship of living in the countryside: herding sheep, tending to wild horses, picking olives with her adopted Italian family, and trying her best to learn the regional dialect. The result is a rich, comic, and unconventional portrait about learning to live and love in the most unexpected ways.

I Watch You

I Watch You
Author: Irene Cao
Publisher: Italian Pleasures
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014-06-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781497641297

What do you do when your greatest temptation is a dangerously handsome and alluring man? Elena works as an art restorer in Venice, and is in the process of bringing an old fresco to light in a historic palazzo. Art is her world, along with her best friend, Gaia, and Filippo, an old pal who she thinks just might be her new love . . . until Leonardo comes along. A chef with a tempestuous spirit, Leonardo is in Venice to launch a new restaurant, and he pushes all of Elena's buttons--good and bad. As Leonardo awakens Elena's senses, she faces the difficult yet exciting choice between the safety Filippo promises and the danger of Leonardo's embrace. I Watch You is part one of a bestselling erotic trilogy that proves Italians definitely do it better.