A Worlde of Wordes, the first-ever comprehensive Italian-English dictionary, was published in 1598 by John Florio. One of the most prominent linguists and educators in Elizabethan England, Florio was greatly responsible for the spreading of Italian letters and culture throughout educated English society. Especially important was Florio's dictionary, which - thanks to its exuberant wealth of English definitions - made it initially possible for English readers to access Italy's rich Renaissance literary and scientific culture.

Award-winning author Hermann W. Haller has...

Alvise Cornaro (c.1484-1566) was the son of a Paduan innkeeper with presumed ties to the patrician Cornaro family of Venice. Highly ambitious, he acquired a name for himself as a businessman, architect, and patron of the arts. Critically ill around age 40 - likely with diabetes and gout - he resolved to abandon his intemperate lifestyle. The strict rules regarding food and drink that he adopted and which led to his recovery are outlined in his most famous treatise, the Vita Sobria (1558). The work, which featured prescriptions for living to 100 years - stressing healthy lifestyle,...

The birthplace of Boccaccio, Machiavelli, and the powerful Medici family, Florence was also the first great banking and commercial centre of continental Europe. The city s middle-class merchants, though lacking the literary virtuosity of its most famous sons, were no less prolific as writers of account books, memoirs, and diaries. Written by ordinary men, these first-hand accounts of commercial life recorded the everyday realities of their businesses, families, and personal lives alongside the high drama of shipwrecks, plagues, and political conspiracies.

Published in Italian in...

One of the first and most important Italian playwrights to move away from the commedia dell'arte tradition of improvisation, Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793) wrote more naturalistic "comedies of character" that featured the dialect and situations of everyday life in Venice.

Five Comedies collects a selection of Goldoni's finest plays, annotated and translated into English: The New House, The Coffee House, and "The Holiday Trilogy" (Off to the Country, Adventures in the Country, and Back from the Country). Editor Michael Hackett...

Those Who from Afar Look Like Flies is an anthology of poems and essays that aims to provide an organic profile of the evolution of Italian poetry after World War II. Beginning with the birth of Officina and Il Verri, and culminating with the crisis of the mid-seventies, this tome features works by such poets as Pasolini, Pagliarani, Rosselli, Sanguineti and Zanzotto, as well as such forerunners as Villa and Cacciatore.

Each section of this anthology, organized chronologically, is preceded by an introductory note and documents every stylistic or substantial...

Guittone d'Arezzo (ca. 1230-1294) was the most important, prolific, and influential poet and prose writer of the thirteenth century. Unfortunately, his work has been overshadowed by his successor; the more learned and gifted Dante Alighieri.

The poems and prose included in this volume are emblematic of the two phases of Guittone's career: he first achieved fame as a secular love poet but following his conversion in the 1260s he became a renowned religious poet. Guittone's artistic reputation commanded the highest respect. Even Dante's beloved Guinizzelli and Cavalcanti never...