Our big news this year is Italica’s inclusion in the JSTOR collection. All of our historical and art historical titles, and many of our literature translations are now available digitally through the JSTOR library collection for course adoptions and individual research. Please check your library’s online catalog for availability.
One of the treasures in the James Ford Bell collection at the University of Minnesota is Cristoforo Buondelmonti’s Description of the Aegean and Other Islands. Evelyn Edson presents a facsimile edition of the entire manuscript, with introduction, complete transcription, English translation, notes, bibliography and index. We present this book in full color at 8.5 x 11 inches, nearly the full size of the Bell manuscript.
For the first time in English we present Grazia Verasani’s Quo Vadis, Baby? translated from the Italian, with an introduction, by Taylor Corse and Juliann Vitullo. Already a cult classic in Italy, with five sequels so far, a film by Gabriele Salvatores, and a TV mini-series on Sky, this novel introduces English readers to Private Detective Giorgia Cantini. Brutally honest, she smokes and drinks too much, exercises too little, eats on the run, and — the cardinal sin for Italian women — is a messy housekeeper. Even worse, she turns her detection skills onto the secret of her own sister’s mysterious death. Was it a suicide, or something more sinister and closer to home?
Forthcoming in January 2018 is the new dual-language edition of The Deceived by the Intronati of Siena, translated and edited by Donald Beecher & Massimo Ciavolella. This 1531 masterpiece of strong woman characters, cross-dressing, gender confusion, sex, and social satire formed the inspiration for several Renaissance plays and is the ultimate source for Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.
January 2017 saw the publication of the new dual-language edition of Annibal Caro’s The Scruffy Scoundrels also edited and translated by Donald Beecher & Massimo Ciavolella. Written in 1543, this remains a masterpiece of humanist playwriting in which drama both imitates and helps construct life. Rome itself is the main character in Caro’s comedy, as the new city of Paul III both unleashes and ultimately civilizes a wild assortment of comic types and plots.
We’ve published Torquato Tasso again with Max Wickert’s edition and translation of Rinaldo. Tasso composed his first epic poem at the age of eighteen. It combines romantic epic — a form popularized by Italian masters like Boiardo and Ariosto — with the classical influences from Virgil and Aristotle. Rinaldo is a remarkably original achievement in terms of style, organization and plot. Tasso manages to shape an enormous array of characters, geographical backdrops, uncanny events and mysterious devices into an impressively unified narrative.
Earlier this year we presented Luigi Malerba’s novel within a novel, Roman Ghosts (Fantasmi Romani), translated by Miriam Aloisio and Michael Subialka. Malerba’s drama of a loosely married professional couple captures an entire microcosm of modern Rome, a world that is deceptively calm and only apparently in order. As Rebecca West writes in her introduction to this volume, “To enter [Malerba’s world] in this fine translation is to discover just how engaging an author Luigi Malerba is.”
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