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.