By 1520, Niccolo Machiavelli's life in Florence was steadily improving: he had achieved a degree of literary fame, and, following his removal from the Florentine Chancery by the Medici family, he had managed to gain their respect and patronage. But there is one figure whose substantial contributions to Machiavelli's restoration has been hitherto neglected - Lorenzo di Filippo Strozzi (1482-1549), a younger and fabulously wealthy Florentine nobleman. As manuscript evidence suggests, Strozzi brought Machiavelli into his patronage network and aided many of his post-1520...

Dantean Dialogues is a collection of essays by some of the world's most outstanding Dante scholars., These essays enter into conversation with the main themes of the scholarship of Amilcare Iannucci (d. 2007), one of the leading researchers on Dante of his generation and arguably Canada's finest scholar of the Italian poet.

The essays focus on the major themes of Iannucci's work, including the development of Dante's early poetry, Dante's relation to classical and biblical sources, and Dante's reception. The contributors cover crucial aspects of Dante's work, from the...

The Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio has had a long and colourful history in English translation. This new interdisciplinary study presents the first exploration of the reception of Boccaccio's writings in English literary culture, tracing his presence from the early fifteenth century to the 1930s. Guyda Armstrong tells this story through a wide-ranging journey through time and space - from the medieval reading communities of Naples and Avignon to the English court of Henry VIII, from the censorship of the Decameron to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, from the world of fine-press...

This study offers a sustained examination of the presentation of eastern Asia, the Middle East, and northern Africa in two of the most important chivalric epics of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Matteo Maria Boiardo s Orlando Innamorato (1495) and Ludovico Ariosto s Orlando Furioso (1516). Comparing the narratological strategies used to depict non-European characters in these stories, Jo Ann Cavallo argues that Boiardo s cosmopolitan vision of humankind increasingly became replaced by Ariosto s crusading ideology, which emphasized a binary opposition between...

The theatre of the Italian Renaissance was directly inspired by the classical stage of Greece and Rome, and many have argued that the former imitated the latter without developing a new theatre tradition. In this book, Salvatore DiMaria investigates aspects of innovation that made Italian Renaissance stage a modern, original theatre in its own right. He provides important evidence for creative imitation at work by comparing sources and imitations - incuding Machiavelli's Mandragola and Clizia, Cecchi's Assiuolo, Groto's Emilia, and Dolce's Marianna...

Eugenio Montale, the Fascist Storm, and the Jewish Sunflower uncovers one of the great hidden sagas of modern literature. During Italy's fascist period, Eugenio Montale - winner of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Literature and one of the greatest modern poets in any language - fell in love with Irma Brandeis, a glamorous and beautiful Dante scholar and an American Jew. While their romance would fall apart, it would have literary repercussions that extended throughout the poet's career: Montale's works abound with secret codes that speak to a lost lover and muse.

This study is the...

The Mirage of America in Contemporary Italian Literature and Film explores the use of images associated with the United States in Italian novels and films released between the 1980s and the 2000s. In this study, Barbara Alfano looks at the ways in which the individuals portrayed in these works and the intellectuals who created them confront the cultural construct of the American myth. As Alfano demonstrates, this myth is an integral part of Italians discourse to define themselves culturally in essence, Italian intellectuals talk about America often for the purpose of talking about...

Giorgio Bassani (1916-2000) was a Jewish Italian novelist, poet, essayist, editor, and intellectual. A cosmopolitan writer concerned with the problems of Jewish identity and history, Bassani was deeply affected by the persecution and deportation of Italian Jews under Mussolini. His personal experience of this period and its aftermath was fundamental to the creation of his masterwork, the Romanzo di Ferrara (Romance of Ferrara).

In The Drama of the Assimilated Jew, Lucienne Kroha makes Bassani's personal and literary journey accessible to English-language...

Fascism, Architecture, and the Claiming of Modern Milan, 1922-1943 chronicles the dramatic architectural and urban transformation of Milan during the nearly twenty years of fascist rule. The commercial and financial centre of Italy and the birthplace of fascism, Milan played a central role in constructing fascism's national image and identity as it advanced from a revolutionary movement to an established state power.

Using a wide range of archival sources, Lucy M. Maulsby analyses the public buildings, from the relatively modest party headquarters to the grandiose...

In 1948, the poet Eugenio Montale published his Quaderno di traduzioni and created an entirely new Italian literary genre, the "translation notebook." The quaderni were the work of some of Italy's foremost poets, and their translation anthologies proved fundamental for their aesthetic and cultural development.

Modern Italian Poets shows how the new genre shaped the poetic practice of the poet-translators who worked within it, including Giorgio Caproni, Giovanni Giudici, Edoardo Sanguineti, Franco Buffoni, and Nobel Prize-winner Eugenio Montale, displaying...