Wednesday, March 19, 2025

Italica Press on JSTOR

Italica Press has long been one of JSTOR’s publishers, but we are happy to announce that we have now made it easier to access JSTOR digital editions of our books via easy links on our web sites’s title pages.

Just go to any title on our website. On the left you will find the available editions listed. Just click on the JSTOR link. If you belong to a participating institution (public, university, or private library) digital access will be seamless and free for you and your students.

Individuals can also access these JSTOR digital editions online on a pay-for-use basis.

Tuesday, March 4, 2025

Verasani’s Nowhere Fast Published

Italica Press announces its next title in its Italian Crime Writers Series.

 In this second book in the PI Giorgia Cantini series, she investigates the disappearance of Vanessa Liverani, a high-class call girl. There Giorgia uncovers a sordid world of prosperous businessmen, doctors, and lawyers who hire prostitutes for private sex parties. 

Much of Nowhere Fast takes place in Bologna and among the sandstone cliffs of Contrafforte Pliocenico Natural Reserve. But even there, Giorgia fails to find an idyllic existence as she gets to know Vanessa Liverani’s family, whose troubled lives remain rooted in the traditions and rhythms of rural life. Between these two worlds, Vanessa’s young son Willy is trapped, surrounded by family but tragically on his own. 


Meanwhile, Giorgia herself struggles between memories of her unruly and joyous youth and the bitter realities of her adult life. For Giorgia, growing up is a layer of ice slowly spreading over our ability to have strong feelings and authentic personal lives.


Introduction, first English translation. 192 pp.



Saturday, January 11, 2025

The Theft (Il Furto) Published

 

We are happy to announce our first publication for 2025:  a new edition, with the first English translation, of the Italian Renaissance comedy The Theft (Il Furto) by Francesco D’Ambra. The Theft was originally performed in Florence in 1544 for the Accademia Fiorentina and for Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici of Florence and subsequently grand duke of Tuscany.  The Theft is the work of an accomplished and revered dramaturge. 

Although performances of dramatic works in Florence often featured intermedi — entr’acte musical compositions — in many cases the music composed for them exists only in fragments. But this play is almost unique in the history of the Italian Renaissance theater and music because the intermedio materials survive in their entirety. 

The volume includes scholarly editions of Francesco D’Ambra’s and Ugo Martelli’s original Italian texts. Vanni Bramanti uses all the relevant primary sources and provides a critical apparatus to the text and an introduction to the playwright and the play. Linda L. Carroll presents an authoritative facing English annotated translation of the text. 

It also offers Alexander Dean’s edition of the entr’acte music and Anthony M. Cummings’ introduction to poet Ugo Martelli’s and composer Francesco Corteccia’s entr’actes. 

The Theft is the latest addition to Italica's series of Renaissance and Modern Plays.

Dual-language drama. Preface, introductions, plot summary, appendix, notes, and bibliography. 324 pages.

Please have a look.

Monday, November 25, 2024

40th Anniversary Catalog now released.

We are very happy to announce the release of our Catalog 62 to mark the 40th Anniversary of Italica Press. Inside you'll find 82 pages, including a letter to our readers, a listing of all our authors, editors, and translators for the past 40 years, six new and recent titles, and all our current series offerings.

We’re quite proud of our four decades of publishing among the best medieval, early modern, and contemporary authors in well edited, reviewed, and affordable editions. Please have a look and download our Catalog 62.

Wednesday, October 16, 2024

Jaeger’s Medieval Humanism Now Published

Italica Press is pleased to announce the publication of C. Stephen Jaeger’s Medieval Humanism: Collected Essays.

In this volume Jaeger argues that a synthesis of culture from 950 to 1150 emerges from the humanism of the early cathedral schools that proliferated from the second half of the tenth century and from the educational innovations closely tied to the rule of Emperor Otto I, the Great. Its thought and teaching takes its character from the fusion of ancient Roman philosophy and ethical ideals with Christian teachings. Its influence in church and imperial administration is as profound as it is in philosophy, literary style, and social mores. A humanist educated class emerges from these schools that reaches deep into clerical, monastic, and worldly spheres.

These collected essays, some published here for the first time, summarize the past fifty years of Jaeger’s work and thought. Its introduction, revisions, and updates also incorporate other scholars’ research over the past half-century, remove the archival character of standard “collected essays,” and produce a fresh view of a new reinvisioning of European cultural history. These chapters also speak to our own age of rapidly changing cultural and educational values.

Preface, introduction, comprehensive bibliography, notes, index. 510 pages.

This is the latest volume in Italica’s series Studies in Art and History.