A Cinema of Poetry brings Italian film studies into dialogue with fields outside its usual purview by showing how films can contribute to our understanding of aesthetic questions that stretch back to Homer. Joseph Luzzi considers the relation between film and literature, especially the cinematic adaptation of literary sources and, more generally, the fields of rhetoric, media studies, and modern Italian culture.

The book balances theoretical inquiry with close readings of films by the masters of Italian cinema: Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti,...

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, Joseph Luzzi straddles these two perspectives in "My Two Italies" 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,...

On a cold November morning, Joseph Luzzi found himself racing to the hospital. His wife, Katherine, eight-and-a-half months pregnant, had been in a horrible car accident--in one terrible instant, Luzzi became both a widower and a first-time father.

In the aftermath of unthinkable tragedy, Luzzi relied on the support of his Italian immigrant family, returning to his childhood home in Rhode Island to mourn and to care for his infant daughter. Adrift and grieving, Luzzi found himself sharing Dante's dark wood with an intimacy that years of scholarship had never shown him. As Luzzi...