Catalog 58 Now Available

Our Italica Press Catalog 58 for Fall 2019 is now available and ready for download. It contains six new titles and our complete backlist.

This season’s new offering include New Italian Voices, translated and edited by Cinzia Sartini Blum and Deborah L. Contrada. This major new collection includes Italian writers from India and Syria, Eastern Europe, North and sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Italy. This volume brings together a group of accomplished, award-winning authors of growing international acclaim.

We are pleased to announce the publication of the next volume in our Documentary History of Naples series. Volume editors Charlotte Nichols & James H. Mc Gregor present Renaissance Naples: A Documentary History 1400–1600. They offer the first comprehensive English-language collection of sources to treat the city of Naples from the end of the medieval to the early modern period. This book presents 169 readings in English translation drawn from historical, biographical, financial, literary, artistic, religious and cultural documents starting with the later Angevin dynasty and ending at the 17th century.

Eileen Gardiner also offers the next volume in her ongoing Hell-on-Line series of transcultural texts describing the infernal otherworld. Greek & Roman Hell: Visions, Tours and Descriptions of the Infernal Otherworld includes seventeen texts that range from epic poems by Homer and Virgil to plays by Aristophanes and Seneca, dialogues by Plato, satirical pieces by Lucian of Samosata, to novels and narrative poems. It provides a comprehensive overview of the nature of Greek and Roman hell.

Also new is The Miracles and Translatio of Saint James, books 2 and 3 of the Liber Sancti Jacobi. This presents a translation, with introduction, commentaries and notes by Thomas F. Coffey and Maryjane Dunn. This is the fourth of a projected five-volume series publishing modern English translations and commentary in our complete Compostela Project.   

Kiril Petkov brings us another important Mediterranean text with his From Cyprus to Lepanto, an annotated translation of the History of Giovanni Pietro Contarini. Written in Italian, Contarini’s account of the battle of Lepanto in 1571 and the events leading up to it offers a humanist historical narrative with keen and consistent reflections on the political philosophy of conflict in the context of the Ottoman-Catholic confrontation in the early modern Mediterranean. 

Finally, we’ve published another important title by Nobel Prize winning novelist Grazia Deledda: Ivy, translated from the Italian, with introduction, by Mary Ann Frese Witt and Martha Witt. Many consider Ivy to be Deledda’s best work, surpassing even Elias Portolu and Reeds in the Wind (Canne al vento). Here she deeply probes the misguided but altruistic motivation of a woman totally dependent on others who lack her own moral fortitude.

New Italian Voices Published

We are happy to announce the publication of New Italian Voices, a major new collection of Italian writers from India and Syria, Eastern Europe, North and sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Italy, edited and translated by Cinzia Sartini Blum and Deborah L. Contrada. They have brought together a group of accomplished, award-winning authors of growing international acclaim. New Italian Voices is an eclectic and vibrant collection of poetry, short stories, essays, theater, and prose by twenty authors from fifteen countries writing today in Italy, in Italian.   

Over the past three decades, Italy has become a destination for people driven from their homelands by economic, political, and cultural forces. The resulting demographic and social changes have largely been defined negatively by Italian media. Scaremongering headlines paint a picture of assault on the Italian coasts, a mass invasion disassociated from news about the labor market and linked instead to growing concerns about security.  

Excluded and objectified in political, legal, and media narratives, migrants challenge those discourses with literary narratives, and their new voices offer a variety of transnational experiences and transcultural sensibilities, exemplifying a broad range of themes and literary strategies. Please have a look at http://www.italicapress.com/index517.html!

Contarini’s “From Cyprus to Lepanto” Published

We are happy to announce the publication of Giovanni Pietro Contarini’s From Cyprus to Lepanto, edited and translated by Kiril Petkov.

At Lepanto, on the morning of October 7, 1571, two massive fleets joined battle at the rocks of Curzolari at the entrance of the Gulf of Patras, off the coast of western Greece. The armada of the Holy League, a coalition of Venetian, Spanish, and papal vessels, augmented with squadrons from the duchies of Tuscany, Savoy, Parma, and Urbino, the Knights Hospitaller of Malta, the Republic of Genoa, and other Christian allies, confronted a comparable Ottoman naval force augmented with North African corsairs.

More than 450 heavily armed galleys with over 150,000 sailors, oarsmen, and soldiers clashed in a short but fierce fight. Little quarter was sought, or given, by either side. In terms of hardware, manpower, and logistics, it was the largest-ever encounter of oared vessels of the pre-modern world. The Battle of Lepanto was the peak of the war between the Ottomans and the Mediterranean Christian powers.

In the chorus of eyewitness and contemporary accounts of the battle and the events that led to it, Giovanni Pietro Contarini’s History of the Events, which occurred from the Beginning of the War Brought against the Venetians by Selim the Ottoman, to the Day of the Great and Victorious Battle against the Turks holds the pride of place. Published in 1572, a few months after Lepanto, the History is the first comprehensive account of the war, and the only one to attempt a concise but complete overview of its course and the Holy League’s triumph.

Kiril Petkov provides the first complete English translation of Contarini’s History. His introduction places it within its historical context of international diplomacy and war, ideological conflict, and individual agency.

188 pp., illustrated, introduction, annotated English translation, glossary, bibliography, index. History, Mediterranean Studies

Another fine review of Edson’s Buondelmonti

Evelyn Edson’s edition and translation of Cristoforo Buondelmonti’s Description of the Aegean and Other Islands has received another fine review, by Emmanouil Michailou, in the latest issue of Imago Mundi. “…All can enjoy this well-produced book and get ensnared by Buondelmonti’s maps and descriptions of the major islands of the Western world. Map historians in particular will be grateful to Evelyn Edson for her wonderful exposition of Cristoforo Buondelmonti’s pioneering creation. Isolarii still play an important role in the growing research of cartography and having such an accessible example on one’s own desk is a privilege.” Please check this review out. 

New Review for Edson’s Buondelmonti

Evelyn Edson’s edition and translation of Cristoforo Buondelmonti’s Description of the Aegean and Other Islands has received a fine review by Craig Kallendorf in the last number of Seventeenth-Century News/Neo-Latin News. “A lavish production… it does indeed meet the highest aesthetic standards, but it is also a work of scholarship, carefully prepared over a period of several years. In addition, it is a valuable reminder that Neo-Latin includes not only poetry and plays, but also less obvious genres like travel literature.” Please check this review out. 

New Titles, Winter 2019

We’re happy to announce two new titles about to be published for this Winter season. The first is Renaissance Naples: A Documentary History, 1400–1600, edited by Charlotte Nichols and James H. Mc Gregor. This book offers the first comprehensive English-language collection of sources to treat the city of Naples from the end of the medieval to the early modern period. This book presents 169 readings in English translation drawn from historical, biographical, financial, literary, artistic, religious and cultural documents starting with the later Angevin dynasty and ending at the 17th century.

Its 558 pages present 169 readings, preface, introduction, notes and bibliography, appendices, including the Tavola Strozzi with key, Map of Renaissance Naples with thumbnail key, index. The volume contains also 86 b&w figures, plus 48 thumbnail views and links to online resources from A Documentary History of Naples, including image galleries with 417 additional images in full color.

Our second offering is Grazia Deledda’s Ivy, translated by Mary Ann Frese Witt and Martha Witt. Many consider Ivy to be Deledda’s best work, surpassing even Elias Portolu and Reeds in the Wind (Canne al vento). Here she deeply probes the misguided but altruistic motivation of a woman totally dependent on others who lack her own moral fortitude. 

Deledda won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1926, writing fiction set in Sardinia, mining it deeply and evoking its people and their character. Ivy, Deledda’s third novel, was originally published in 1908 in Italian as L’Edera and has never been previously published in English.