Kategoria BISAC: Travel >> Europe - Italy

From humble beginnings, Rome became perhaps the greatest intercontinental power in the world. Why did this historic city become so much more influential than its neighbor, nearby Latium, which was peopled by more or less the same stock? Over the years, historians, political analysts, and sociologists have discussed this question ad infinitum, without considering one underlying factor that led to the rise of Rome--the geology now hidden by the modern city.

This book demonstrates the important link between the history of Rome and its geologic setting in a lively,...

An anthology of writings from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries designed to illustrate the life and thought of Italians for students and the general reader. It offers a broad sampling of humanist work by educators, statesmen, philosophers, churchmen and courtiers translated into English. This is a reprint of a book first published in 1965.

No other people over so long a history have shown a greater knack for survival than the Italians. In this wryly affectionate book, Hofmann reveals his adopted countrymen in all their glorious paradoxes, capturing their national essence as no other book has done since Luigi Barzini's classic, The Italians. The national art of "arrangement"-- dodging taxes, double-dealing, working only as hard as one must-- is counteracted by Italian inventive genius, gusto for life, fierce individuality, deep family bonds (as well as animosities), and a marvelously hedonistic sophistication.

Named one of the "Big Ten Outstanding Books from University Presses for 2006" by ForeWord magazine

For Margaret Doody, Venice, poised between East and West, earth and sea, sacred and profane, occupies a place only its own. Appearances confound. Renaissance ladies achieved their blond beauty by crimping and dyeing their hair in urine. The richly ornamented facades of its buildings mask lighter structures based on wood pilings ultimately floating on clay and water. Marble is intimate with mud. In Doody's Venice, the holy is never far from the sensual, the earthy and carnal....

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 scorching summers. 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 -- named a Best Travel Book of 2003 by Conde Nast Traveler -- is a marvelous evocation of Calabria. A grandson of Calabrese immigrants, Rotella persuades his father to visit the...