Petrarch’s Two Gardens Published

Petrarch’s Two Gardens: Landscape and the Image of Movement by William Tronzo has just been published. The four essays that make up this book take as their subject gardens of the Middle Ages and Renaissance whose traces are still visible, in varying degrees, at sites in Italy and France: Palermo and Rome, the Vaucluse and Hesdin. Traces only, as these gardens have long since been emptied of the life whose insistent motion gave them shape and in the intervening years have been transformed in such a way as to entangle and obscure significant moments of their past.

The landscape it seeks to narrate, in four discrete episodes, stands not alone, as an independent and integral creation, but as an installation within a more enduring environment in much the same way that temporary “ambient architecture” — the architecture of the stage set, the showroom and the festival — stands within the framework of building and city.

This new book is the second in a collaboration with Professor Tronzo, after  Medieval Naples: An Architectural and Urban History, 400–1400 (with Caroline Bruzelius) and is the latest volume in our continuing series, Studies in Art and History. It is the winner of the 2012 David R. Coffin Publication Grant of the Foundation for Landscape Studies. 

Petrarch’s Two Gardens is also the first title in which Italica Press has published full color art — to wonderful effect. This title is available now in hardcover and paperback, and will soon be published in a Kindle edition.

We are also happy to announce that our Catalog 49 is now available for download or viewing on screen.

New Fall Titles

This Fall Italica Press will publish three new titles in its Literature series: one in Medieval & Renaissance Texts (and Poetry in Translation) and two in our now expanding Renaissance & Modern Plays series.

Aiol: A Chanson de Geste records the exploits of the young knight, Aiol, as he reclaims by word and deed his father’s and mother’s unjustly stolen heritage. He gains the love of a Saracen princess who converts when she is convinced of the truth of the Christian god by Aiol’s warrior’s prowess. He then aids the French King Louis in ending a debilitating war led by rebellious vassals and (in an allusion to the Fourth Crusade) similarly helps Emperor Grasien, the king of Venice, to end his own war against an enemy to the East. Aiol’s deeds ultimately bring justice to the kingdom of France.
But the poem is far more than the tale itself. Aiol, like many other crusading and romance epics, artfully recreates both the Christian culture of the West and the Islamic culture of the Levant. 

Modern Edition and First English Translation by Sandra C. Malicote & A. Richard Hartman. Dual-Language Poetry. Introduction, notes, bibliography, and all 11 illustrations from the original Paris MS.

In Watching the Moon and Other Plays Patricia Gaborik presents an extensive introduction on the thought and legacy of Massimo Bontempelli (1878–1960) and complete translations of three of his major plays: Watching the Moon (1916), Stormcloud (1935) and Cinderella (1942). 
Bontempelli, poet, novelist, playwright and composer would become one of the literary giants of the 20th century. The father of magic realism in Italy, he was associated with the futurist avant-garde and then launched his own influential literary movement, Novecento. Editor and creator of various journals, he collaborated with some of the greatest writers of his day, from James Joyce to Luigi Pirandello. Bontempelli was a prominent fascist intellectual and remained a controversial writer. In 1953, however, he was awarded the Strega Prize, Italy’s most prestigious literary award.
1st English translation. Introduction, notes,  bibliography, illustrated.

In Six Characters in Search of an Author  Martha Witt and Mary Ann Frese Witt present, for the first time together, and many for the first time in English, the writings that formed the genesis of Luigi Pirandello’s  Six Characters in Search of an Author, along with a new translation of the theater masterpiece itself.
The interaction between characters demanding to “live” in writing and an author who rejects them would be developed in Pirandello’s 1911 story “The Tragedy of a Character.” In 1925, Pirandello conceived the idea of writing a novel about an author who rejects the characters who come to him begging to be put into a novel, and in a July 1917 letter to his son, he gives the novel a title: Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore: Romanzo da fare (Six Characters in Search of an Author: A Novel to Be Made). Martha Witt and Mary Ann Frese Witt provide all these materials for a complete appreciation of this masterwork.
New English translation. Introduction, notes, bibliography.

Our Latest Catalog

Our latest catalog, no. 48, for Summer 2013, is now available for downloading or viewing online. We’ve revised it for easier viewing of all publication formats. It offers our complete title list, arranged by series, in all print and digital versions, with full descriptions and pricing information. This summer we’re offering three new titles.

To have a look, please click here or visit our Italica Press Home Page and follow the Download Complete Catalog link.

The Petrarch Project

Italica Press has been publishing editons and studies of the work of Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374) since its first title in 1986. Over the years we have gradually added works by and about this foundational humanist. These now come together to provide a valuable series of titles for the classroom, the nonspecialist and the general reader. We call the series The Petrarch Project. Please follow this link to see already published titles.

Forthcoming titles include Petrarch’s Two Gardens: Landscape and the Image of Movement by William Tronzo; Petrarch: Political Writings edited and translated by Jirí Spicka; and Pseudo-Petrarch,  Lives of the Roman Popes and Emperors, translated and edited by Aldo S. Bernardo and Reta A. Bernardo, introduction and notes by Tania Zampini. 

We welcome further proposals for editions, translations and studies.

We’re pleased to announce the publication of A Scarlet Renaissance: Essays in Honor of Sarah Blake McHam, edited by Arnold Victor Coonin. The volume takes its place in Italica’s ongoing series, Studies in Art & History.

Twelve essays by former doctoral students honor the achievements of Sarah Blake McHam as a teacher, mentor and scholar. Topics cover a wide range of Italian art, ranging from the trecento to the early seventeenth century, including work in various media, especially Renaissance sculpture. These works share McHam’s methodology of applying interdisciplinary evidence to rigorously understand the role art plays within its culture.

The contributions include Arnold Victor Coonin, Preface and Acknowledgments * Debra Pincus, “Like a Good Shepherd”: A Tribute to Sarah Blake McHam * Amy R. Bloch, Perspective and Narrative in the Jacob and Esau Panel of Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise * David Boffa, Sculptors’ Signatures and the Construction of Identity in the Italian Renaissance * Meghan Callahan, Bronzino, Giambologna & Adriaen de Vries: Influence, Innovation and the Paragone * Arnold Victor Coonin, The Spirit of Water: Reconsidering the Putto Mictans Sculpture in Renaissance Florence * Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio, From Medalist to Sculptor: Leone Leoni’s Bronze Bust of Charles V * Phillip Earenfight, Civitas Florenti[a]e: The New Jerusalem and the Allegory of Divine Misericordia * Gabriela Jasin, God’s Oddities and Man’s Marvels: Two Sculptures of Medici Dwarfs * Linda A. Koch, Medici Continuity, Imperial Tradition and Florentine History: Piero de’ Medici’s Tabernacle of the Crucifix at S. Miniato al Monte * Heather R. Nolin, A New Interpretation of Paolo Veronese’s Saint Barnabas Healing the Sick * Katherine Poole, Medici Power and Tuscan Unity: The Cavalieri di Santo Stefano and Public Sculpture in Pisa and Livorno under Ferdinando I * Lilian H. Zirpolo, Embellishing the Queen’s Residence: Queen Christina of Sweden’s Patronage of Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Members of His Circle of Sculptors * Sarah Blake McHam’s List of Publications.

1st printing. 338 pages, 117 illustrations. Preface, introduction, notes and bibliography; index.

Medieval Naples: A Documentary History

We’re happy to announce the print publication of Ronald G. Musto’s Medieval Naples: A Documentary History, 400-1400 as the latest volume in Italica’s A Documentary History of Naples.

This is a revised and expanded version of the edition published online for the Kindle and iPad over a year ago. This edition includes new readings and additional sections edited by Eileen Gardiner on medieval Naples’ literature, hagiography, literate and book culture. 

A new Introduction offers a comprehensive survey of the periods covered in the historical texts, with a discussion of the historiography and of important research and interpretive issues. These include the material development of the medieval city from Late Antiquity through the end of the Angevin period, the condition and use of the available primary sources and archaeological evidence, with particular attention given to the wide variety of recent excavations and of archival materials, the question of the ruralization and recovery of its urban core through the little known Ducal period — with some discussion of the city’s changing population — the question of Naples’ importance as a commercial and political capital, its developing economic and material base, and the question of its relationship to its hinterland on the one hand and to broader Mediterranean contexts on the other. It also surveys the changes in Naples’ grid plan, its walls and fortifications, its port, and its commercial and residential development. It complements the discussions in Caroline Bruzelius and William Tronzo’s Medieval Naples: An Architectural a Urban History.

It totals 460 pages, contains 82 readings covering all aspects of Neapolitan urban life and culture from c.400 to c.1400, 74 figures, 60 thumbnail images keyed to a map of medieval Naples, a complete bibliography, index, and a key to external resources, including our Interactive Map of Medieval Naples, our online Bibliographies, and our online image galleries. The book is now available in paperback and the hardcover edition will be ready soon. A revised and expanded Kindle and iPad edition will follow shortly after that.