Download or read book Images and Shadows written by Iris Origo and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An extraordinary memoir by Iris Origo, who chronicled political life in A Chill in the Air and War in Val d'Orcia, and now turns inward to describe her own family, the work of writing, and the transcience of memory. Images and Shadows, Iris Origo’s autobiographical account of her early life, is as perceptive and humane and beautifully written as her celebrated memoir War in Val d’Orcia. Origo’s father came from an old and moneyed American family, her mother was the daughter of an Irish peer, and Iris grew up in the most privileged of circumstances. Her father died of tuberculosis when he was only thirty, and her mother moved to Fiesole, Italy, where she and Iris developed a close friendship with the great connoisseur and art historian Bernard Berenson. Later, Origo and her Italian husband transformed a desolate and deforested Tuscan property into a flourishing estate, and it was there that she discovered her true calling as a writer. In Images and Shadows, Origo paints portraits of her shy, loving father and her headstrong mother, and describes beloved places, the books that formed her sensibility, and how she grew up and made her way in the world. She reflects on the pleasures and challenges of writing and evokes the persistence and fragility of memory. Images and Shadows is an autobiography that is as thoughtful as it is profoundly touching.
Download or read book Iris Origo written by Caroline Moorehead and published by Allison & Busby. This book was released on 2014-06-19 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Iris Origo was one of the twentieth century's most attractive and intriguing women, a brilliantly perceptive historian and biographer whose works remain widely admired. Iris grew up in Italy where she became part of the colourful and privileged Anglo-Florentine set that included Edith Wharton, Harold Acton and the Berensons. When Iris married Antonio Origo, they bought and revived La Foce, a derelict stretch of the beautiful Val d'Orcia valley in Tuscany and created an estate that thrives to this day. During World War II they sided firmly with the Allies, taking considerable risks in protecting children and sheltering partisans and Iris's diary from that time, War in Val d'Orcia, is now considered a modern classic. Caroline Moorehead has drawn on many previously unpublished letters, diaries, and papers to write the definitive biography of a very remarkable woman.
Download or read book A Chill in the Air written by Iris Origo and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2018-08-07 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This recently discovered “trenchant, intelligent” follow-up to the British expatriate’s classic memoir, War in Val d’Orcia, chronicles life in Italy in the year leading up to WW2 (New Yorker). This insightful diary provides a vivid, ground-level account of how Mussolini decided on a course of action that would devastate his country and ultimately destroy his regime. In 1939 it was not a foregone conclusion that Mussolini would enter World War II on the side of Hitler. Though the British-born Origo lived with her Italian husband on an estate in a remote part of Tuscany, she was supremely well-connected and regularly in touch with intellectual and diplomatic circles in Rome, where her godfather, William Phillips, was the American ambassador. Her diary documents the Fascist government’s growing infatuation with Nazi Germany as Hitler’s armies marched triumphantly across Europe, and the campaign of propaganda and intimidation that was mounted in support of its new aims. The book ends with the birth of Origo’s daughter and Origo’s decision to go to Rome to work with prisoners of war at the Italian Red Cross. A Chill in the Air offers an indispensable record of Italy at war as well as a thrilling story of a formidable woman’s transformation from observer to actor at a great historical turning point.
Download or read book A Need to Testify written by Iris Origo and published by Helen Marx Books. This book was released on 2002 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction by Ted Morgan When originally released in the early 1980s, New Statesman called Origo's final book 'a sensitive and beautifully written book by a remarkable writer.' Available again in this new edition, Origo's memoir tells the story of four friends, writer Lauro de Bosis, American monologuist Ruth Draper, the historian Gaetano Salvemi, and author of 'Fontamara' and 'Bread and Wine', Ignazio Silone, each of whom made various life sacrifices in the fight for a non-fascist Italy. Illustrated throughout with photos.
Download or read book War in Val D Orcia written by Iris Origo and published by Allison & Busby. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is quite impossible to attach importance to material possessions now. All that one still clings to is a few vital affections' Iris Origo, October 1943. Marchesa Iris Origo and her husband had been settled at their rural estate of La Foce since 1924. When the Second World War broke out Origo, an Englishwoman married to an Italian landowner, had divided loyalties. But as the war dragged on and the hostilities escalated, the small community of Val d'Orcia found themselves helping evacuees, orphans, refugees, prisoners of war and soldiers from both sides, concerned less with who was fighting whom than caring for those who needed their aid. Origo kept her diary throughout this time, when the risk of betrayal was a fact of life and the penalty for helping the enemy would result in death. Even with German troops occupying her manor house, she wrote at night about her valiant attempts to shelter refugees, burying her diary in the garden each morning. The result is a book which has become a classic, an affirmation in itself of courage and resistance, and an unsentimental, compelling story of the trials and tragedies of wartime.
Download or read book Leopardi a Biography written by Iris Origo and published by . This book was released on 1935 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Merchant of Prato written by Iris Origo and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A warm, intimate, and engrossing biography of Francesco di Marco Datini, who built a powerful mercantile network in fourteenth-century Tuscany, and a peerless evocation of the sensations, personalities, and everyday struggles of Italian life more than half a millennium in the past. “For God and Profit” is how the medieval merchant Francesco di Marco Datini headed a notebook in which he kept track of his business dealings, and these were certainly his guiding lights. Born in the 1330s in the Tuscan town of Prato, the son of a poor taverner, Datini set out at the age of fifteen for Avignon, where, over the course of the next thirty-five years, he made a fortune trading in arms, armor, artworks, wool, saffron, leather, silk, and much more. Returning home, he expanded his operations, setting up offices all across the Mediterranean, which he oversaw through an unceasing flow of correspondence. When he died, Datini asked that all his papers be preserved in his house, and in 1870 they were found, a little worm-eaten and mouse-nibbled but largely intact, in a sack under the stairs. They are one of the great records not only of medieval life but of the emergence of the modern commercial world. Drawing on this rich archive, Iris Origo offers a wonderfully vivid account of Datini’s public and private worlds. The Merchant of Prato is a masterpiece of modern narrative history.
Download or read book La Foce written by Benedetta Origo and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2001-10-26 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Situated in the Val d'Orcia, a wide valley in southeastern Tuscany, La Foce is run by Benedetta and Donata Origo, and is open to the public one day a week.".
Download or read book The Last Attachment written by Iris Origo and published by John Murray. This book was released on 1971 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Maggie's husband, smooth, silver-haired, patrician Jeremy, the British Ambassador to Vienna, drops dead unexpectedly of a heart attack, she is stunned. But her shock soon turns to fury when she discovers that he died in the arms of a beautiful blonde Viennese hostess - and that moreover while she, Maggie, was expected to make all sorts of domestic economies on behalf of the British tax-payer, Jeremy and the athletic Mausie had been indulging in expensive sea-food dinners, skiing trips and all manner of luxuries.But Mausie turns out to be, as it were, only the tip of the iceberg. As Maggie uncovers a trail of infidelities conducted under her nose in every one of the European cities she had so dutifully made her home in Jeremy's majestic wake, she determines to exact her revenge. With Zoltan, Jeremy's mournful Hungarian driver, she embarks on a magnificent Grand Tour of their former postings, wreaking a pleasurable havoc wherever she goes. Along the way, Maggie undergoes her own transformation and learns to re-evaluate her marriage, her own abilities - and just who her friends really are...
Download or read book The Religious Sense written by Luigi Giussani and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 1997-10-24 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Religious Sense, the fruit of many years of dialogue with students, is an exploration of the search for meaning in life. Luigi Giussani shows that the nature of reason expresses itself in the ultimate need for truth, goodness, and beauty. These needs constitute the fabric of the religious sense, which is evident in every human being everywhere and in all times. So strong is this sense that it leads one to desire that the answer to life's mystery might reveal itself in some way.
Download or read book A Thousand Days in Tuscany written by Marlena de Blasi and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2005-09-27 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They had met and married on perilously short acquaintance, she an American chef and food writer, he a Venetian banker. Now they were taking another audacious leap, unstitching their ties with exquisite Venice to live in a roughly renovated stable in Tuscany. Once again, it was love at first sight. Love for the timeless countryside and the ancient village of San Casciano dei Bagni, for the local vintage and the magnificent cooking, for the Tuscan sky and the friendly church bells. Love especially for old Barlozzo, the village mago, who escorts the newcomers to Tuscany’s seasonal festivals; gives them roasted country bread drizzled with just-pressed olive oil; invites them to gather chestnuts, harvest grapes, hunt truffles; and teaches them to caress the simple pleasures of each precious day. It’s Barlozzo who guides them across the minefields of village history and into the warm and fiercely beating heart of love itself. A Thousand Days in Tuscany is set in one of the most beautiful places on earth–and tucked into its fragrant corners are luscious recipes (including one for the only true bruschetta) directly from the author’s private collection.
Download or read book Queen Bee of Tuscany written by Ben Downing and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2013-06-18 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Quite simply one of the best books of the year." —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Ben Downing's Queen Bee of Tuscany brings an extraordinary Victorian back to life. Born into a distinguished intellectual family and raised among luminaries such as Dickens and Thackeray, Janet Ross married at eighteen and went to live in Egypt. There, for the next six years, she wrote for the London Times, hobnobbed with the developer of the Suez Canal, and humiliated pashas in horse races. In 1867 she moved to Florence, Italy where she spent the remaining sixty years of her life writing a series of books and hosting a colorful miscellany of friends and neighbors, from Mark Twain to Bernard Berenson, at Poggio Gherardo, her house in the hills above the city. Eventually she became the acknowledged doyenne of the Anglo-Florentine colony, as it was known. Yet she was also immersed in the rural life of Tuscany: An avid agriculturalist, she closely supervised the farms on her estate and the sharecroppers who worked them, often pitching in on grape and olive harvests. Spirited, erudite, and supremely well-connected, Ross was one of the most dynamic women of her day. Her life offers a fascinating window on fascinating times, from the Risorgimento to the rise of fascism. Encompassing all this rich history, Queen Bee of Tuscany is a panoramic portrait of an age, a family, and our evolving love affair with Tuscany. A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2013
Download or read book Gabriele d Annunzio written by Lucy Hughes-Hallett and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2013-08-20 with total page 745 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Godfather to Mussolini, national hero of Italy and the WWI irredentist movement, literary icon of Joyce and Pound, lover of actress Eleonora Duse: here is Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s extraordinary biography of Gabriele d’Annunzio, poet, bon vivant, harbinger of Italian fascism. Gabriele d’Annunzio was Italy’s premier poet at a time when poetry mattered enough to trigger riots. A brilliant self-publicist in the first age of mass media, he used his fame to sell his work, seduce women, and promote his extreme nationalism. In 1915 d’Annunzio’s incendiary oratory helped drive Italy to enter the First World War, in which he achieved heroic status as an aviator. In 1919 he led a troop of mutineers into the Croatian port of Fiume and there a delinquent city-state. Futurists, anarchists, communists, and proto-fascists descended on the city. So did literati and thrill seekers, drug dealers, and prostitutes. After fifteen months an Italian gunship brought the regime to an end, but the adventure had its sequel: three years later, the fascists marched on Rome, belting out anthems they’d learned in Fiume, as Mussolini consciously modeled himself after the great poet. At once an aesthete and a militarist, d’Annunzio wrote with equal enthusiasm about Fortuny gowns and torpedoes, and enjoyed making love on beds strewn with rose petals as much as risking death as an aviator. Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s stunning biography vividly re-creates his flamboyant life and dramatic times, tracing the early twentieth century’s trajectory from Romantic idealism to world war and fascist aggression.
Download or read book An Infinity of Graces written by Ethne Clarke and published by WW Norton. This book was released on 2013-07-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the work of the English architect and landscape designer who practiced almost exclusively in Italy from 1907 to midcentury. English expatriate Cecil Ross Pinsent was responsible for the design and construction of new villas and gardens such as the elegant rural estate La Foce, and the renovation of many historically sensitive ones, including Villa I Tatti, Villa Le Balze, and Villa Medici. Edith Wharton sought his advice; Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson admired and were influenced by him. Geoffrey Scott, author of The Architecture of Humanism, dedicated the book to him; and Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe, England’s premier landscape architect, regarded Pinsent as his “first maestro on the placing of buildings in the landscape.” This first book dedicated to bringing to light Pinsent’s contribution to garden design is generously illustrated with photographs from his previously unpublished albums and archive of architectural drawings and sketches, and his letters to family friends and clients.
Download or read book Igifu written by Scholastique Mukasonga and published by Archipelago. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The stories in Igifu summon phantom memories of Rwanda and radiate with the fierce ache of a survivor. From the National Book Award finalist who Zadie Smith says, "rescues a million souls from the collective noun genocide." Scholastique Mukasonga's autobiographical stories rend a glorious Rwanda from the obliterating force of recent history, conjuring the noble cows of her home or the dew-swollen grass they graze on. In the title story, five-year-old Colomba tells of a merciless overlord, hunger or igifu, gnawing away at her belly. She searches for sap at the bud of a flower, scraps of sweet potato at the foot of her parent's bed, or a few grains of sorghum in the floor sweepings. Igifu becomes a dizzying hole in her stomach, a plunging abyss into which she falls. In a desperate act of preservation, Colomba's mother gathers enough sorghum to whip up a nourishing porridge, bringing Colomba back to life. This elixir courses through each story, a balm to soothe the pains of those so ferociously fighting for survival. Her writing eclipses the great gaps of time and memory; in one scene she is a child sitting squat with a jug of sweet, frothy milk and in another she is an exiled teacher, writing down lists of her dead. As in all her work, Scholastique sits up with them, her witty and beaming beloved.
Download or read book Hidden Histories written by D. Medina Lasansky and published by didapress. This book was released on 2018-01-10 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tuscany is a landscape whose cultural construction is complicated and multi-layered. It is this very complexity that this book seeks to untangle. By revealing hidden histories, we learn how food, landscape and architecture are intertwined, as well as the extent to which Italian design and contemporary consumption patterns form a legacy that draws upon the Romantic longings of a century before. In the process, this book reveals the extent to which Tuscany has been constructed by Anglos — and what has been distorted, idealized and even overlooked in the process.
Download or read book Days That Changed the World written by Hywel Williams and published by Quercus. This book was released on 2014-08-12 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The currents of History run deep and often unseen beneath the everyday ripple of events. But now and again the current rises to the surface, and the events of a single day shed an exceptional light on the meaning of the past. Such events are the subject of Days that Changed the World. Some of the 50 days described here mark the end of an era; others the start of something new. Many are the dates of bloody battles or murders; others of momentous decisions or breathtaking discoveries. All are remembered as powerful symbols of their time. Our story begins almost 2500 years ago on 28 September 480 before the Christian Era, when the Athenian navy destroyed the Persian invasion fleet in the Bay of Salamis. Had the Persians won we might never have heard the names of Plato, Aristotle or Alexander, nor recognize the word democracy. Charting 50 such defining moments, concluding with 11 September 2001 and the destruction of New York's Twin Towers, Days that Changed the World is a unique and fascinating way to portray the story of world history. These 50 history-making days include: The Battle of the Salamis; The Assassination of Julius Caesar; The Crucifixion of Jesus Christ; The Dedication of Constantinople; The Death of Muhammad; The Coronation of Charlemagne; The Death of Genghis Khan; The Fall of Constantinople; The Defeat of the Spanish Armada; The Defenestration of Prague; The Fall of the Bastille; The Battle of Waterloo; Parliament Passing the Emancipation Act; The Battle of Sedan; The Boxer Rebellion; The First Day of the Somme; The Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor; The Bombing of Hiroshima; Martin Luther King's "I have a Dream'; The Breaching of the Berlin Wall; Nelson Mandela's Release from Prison; Nine Eleven.
