Italica Press Catalog 64, Summer 2026

Our Italica Press Catalog 64, for Summer 2026, is now available and ready for download. It features five new and recently published titles, plus our complete backlist. This season offers a fine selection of medieval and Renaissance texts, historical geography and cosmology, studies in art and history, and modern Italian fiction and poetry.

New and recent titles include Songs of Castelvecchio, Giovanni Pascoli’s most important collection of verse; Gregorio Dati’s La Sfera / The Globe: Cosmology, Science, and Geography in the Fifteenth-Century Mediterranean; Nobel Prize winner Grazia Deledda’s The Mother; William Tronzo’s Four Mediterranean Capitals: Rome, Constantinople, Palermo, and Venice. Essays in Architecture and Visual Experience; and the next volume in our series of Italian Crime Writers, Grazia Verasani’s Nowhere Fast. Please have a look at our Catalog 64.

Pascoli’s Songs of Castelvecchio Published

We’re happy to announce the publication of Giovanni Pascoli’s Songs of Castelvecchio (Canti di Castelvecchio) in a new complete English translation by Elena Borelli and Stephen Campiglio.

Songs of Castelvecchio is an epic of the countryside and of humanity’s place among the cycle of seasons. Pascoli weaves into the Songs his own autobiographical experience of loss, trauma, and closure. Castelvecchio becomes a symbolic space where past and present coexist, where the poet revisits and relives such emotional moments.

Despite Songs of Castelvecchio’s powerful influence on Anglophone poetry, fewer than a third of the poems in this collection have ever appeared previously in English. Here, for the first time, we present a new translation of the complete work.

“One of the greatest poets of all times.” — Seamus Heaney

Songs of Castelvecchio is the third of Pascoli’s works published by Italica Press and is the newest title in our Poetry in Translation series.

Tronzo, Four Mediterranean Capitals Published

We are happy to announce the publication of William Tronzo's Four Mediterranean Capitals: Rome, Constantinople, Palermo, Venice. Essays in Architecture and Visual Experience.

Tronzo brings together insights into four major late ancient and medieval capitals — Rome, Constantinople, Palermo, and Venice — to uncover their common visual vocabulary of civic space, architecture, and symbolic meaning. Drawing on decades of his own and others’ previous research and publication, he offers new approaches into well-known urban contexts and architectural settings, delving into the viewer’s experience of mosaic, sculpture, drapery, revetment and stone, of wall, dome, and portal, of street and forum to reexamine how historic buildings helped shape the experience of the civic, the imperial, and the divine manifested in urban life and daily movement.

218 pages, 68 color and b&w images, introduction, notes, bibliography, index.

A new title in Italica’s Studies in Art & History series.

 

Mediaevistik Review and Publishers’ Note

We call readers’ attention to a new review by Prof. Albrecht Classen of C. Stephen Jaeger’s Medieval Humanism: Collected Essays that has just been published in Mediaevistik. We thank Prof. Classen for his largely positive review but add a note to the review posted here that clarifies what we view as some oversights in the review.

We invite our readers to read both the review and our Publishers’ Note.

 

Catalog 63, Winter 2026, Now Available for Download

Our Catalog 63, Winter 2026, is now available for download. It presents our entire backlist, with all pricing and ordering information, and all our current series offerings. This season we offer seven new and recent titles ranging from intellectual, architectural, and urban history to cosmological and geographical work, Renaissance drama, dual-language poetry, a contemporary novel, and Italian crime fiction. 

Please have a look.

Gregorio Dati, La Sfera / The Globe Published

Italica Press  is happy to announce the publication of Gregorio Dati's La Sfera /The Globe,

This volume presents the complete text of La Sfera, a parallel English translation, and an array of images from its manuscript tradition.

Seven authors examine the  intellectual and literary genres that influenced Dati, including mapping traditions, medieval cosmology, geography, and natural science, and the traditions of vernacular composition. Their academic disciplines include history, the history of science, literary history, textual criticism, and paleography.

This illustrated edition reproduces images from its many different manuscripts to give readers a clear understanding of Dati’s holistic approach to fifteenth-century poetry, science, art, commerce, and cartography.

Preface, Introduction, complete Italian text of La Sfera with parallel English translation, Notes to the Text and to the Figures, Bibliography, Index. 55 color manuscript images, 1 greyscale image, 1 table, 2 new maps.

Edited by Carrie Beneš, Laura Ingallinella, Laura Morreale, Caterina Agostini, Winston Black, Elena Brizio, and Monica Keane.

History, history of science & literature, cartography, manuscript studies.

Please have a look at: http://www.italicapress.com/index600.html .

Grazia Deledda's The Mother Published

We are happy to announce the publication of a new English translation of Grazia Deledda’s The Mother (La Madre, 1920) by Martha Witt and Mary Ann Frese Witt.

Set in the small Sardinian village of Aar, The Mother powerfully reveals a very contemporary crisis of moral certitude and a spiritual unraveling that leads to unexpected consequences.

D.H. Lawrence alerted English-language readers to Deledda when he wrote the preface to an early translation of La Madre, one of her most important works. However, he failed to understand her power to remain an enduring literary figure. Her ability to blend seemingly ancient morals and codes with the most modern concerns continues to attract readers almost a century after her death.

Please have a look at: http://www.italicapress.com/index598.html

Speculum Review for Huon of Bordeaux

Huon of Bordeaux, translated for the first time into English by Catherine M. Jones and William W. Kibler, has just received a glowing review in Speculum, the pre-eminent journal of medieval studies. 

Bill Burgwinkle of King’s College, Cambridge writes that “The publication of this lively and accurate translation of the thirteenth-century chanson de geste (epic) Huon de Bordeaux calls for some rejoicing.… This is an altogether excellent and welcome addition to the medieval library in English, and we hope that Italica Press and these translators might someday consider furnishing others in the same vein.”

Please have a look at: http://www.italicapress.com/index532.html.

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pascoli’s Tamarisks Published

Italica Press is happy to announce the publication of Giovanni Pascoli's Tamarisks, translated by Piero Garofalo. 

Tamarisks (Myricae) is Giovanni Pascoli’s first major collection of verse. Many of its poems center on manifestations of the rural. Nature is at once an interpretation and interpolation of humanity. These compositions explore the countryside, experience the seasons and their alternation, relate the rhythms of agrarian labor, seek the blooming flower, spy the secluded nest. The collection draws on everyday objects, the changing landscape, the Anthropocene, the disenfranchised, and the natural world to explore humanity’s relationship to nature and to the modern world. 

Tamarisks is a liminal text, rooted in the classical lyrical tradition. It heralded the innovations and experimentation of the avant-garde of the early twentieth century. In breaking with the past and articulating a new poetic language, it is a foundational statement for modern Italian poetry. Tamarisks’ poems and sections develop an internal dialogue that reflects the mediation between the poetic voice and external reality. Pascoli’s poetry is a single vast meditation that explores possibilities by engaging in diverse poetic strategies contemporaneously. The lowly tamarisk, at once humble and noble, is always poetry.

This publication joins Italica Press’s already published translation of Pascoli’s Convivial Poems.

Introduction, bibliography, first-line index, and notes, 330 pages.

New Reviews

We’ve recently had reviews of two of our titles that we’ve found especially interesting.

The first is Lorenzo Miletti’s review in Latomus of Rabun Taylor’s Ancient Naples: A Documentary History. Origins to c. 350 CE. He has high praise for the most recently published volume in our Documentary History of Naples series. Miletti lauds Taylor’s research and the scope of his coverage, his command of the written sources and of the most recent archaeological findings, and his ability to synthesize and interpret these for a broad audience of both specialists and more general readers. The review notes the volume’s up-to-date appeal for both an Anglophone and a wider Italian and international audience. Miletti concludes his review with some suggestions for a larger format, color-illustrated edition. Stay tuned.…

The second is Norman Jope’s piece in the latest Tears in the Fence on Ana Ilievska’s and Pietro Russo’s Contemporary Sicilian Poetry: A Multilingual Anthology. Jope has many very good things to say about the volume, its selection of authors and poems, and Ana Ilievska’s translations. He also raises the question of whether such a collection should reflect the universal themes raised by this wide array of authors — and foregrounded by the editors — or focus more closely on specific times, places, and contexts. These are interesting reflections, from a decidedly Anglophone perspective. 

Please have a look at both reviews.

View a YouTube Video on The Priest’s Hat

View a YouTube video by translator Steve Eaton on Verbal Exchange, “The Priest’s Hat: The Story Behind Italy's First Crime Novel,”  

Steve discusses the novel and author, the actual historical event on which De Marchi based this novel, and the sensational reaction of Italian society to this murder. Please have a look at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pXAXDS-LxU

New Reviews of Pascoli’s Convivial Poems

Elena Borelli & James Ackhurst’s new translation of Giovanni Pascoli’s Convivial Poems has gotten quite a lot of good critical attention this season, with reviews in Reading in Translation, London Grip, Gradiva, and Annali d’Italianistica.

Please have a look at: http://www.italicapress.com/index556.html

 

De Marchi’s The Priest's Hat Published

 

We’re please try announce the publication of The Priest’s Hat by Emilio De Marchi, translated by Steve Eaton & Cinzia Russi. This is the newest title in our Italian Crime Writers Series. 

This suspenseful, moving, and darkly ironic tale loosely based on Count Alessandro Faella’s murder of the priest Virgilio Costa in Imola in 1881. Against the background of late nineteenth-century Naples, the novel brings us the meltdown of an aging playboy, Carlo Coriolano, the last baron of a once-wealthy and powerful clan. 

U barone has squandered his inheritance and now can’t support his extravagant tastes. He’s been banned from his club and depends on his loyal, long-suffering housekeeper for pocket change. And if he doesn’t repay an old loan, he’ll soon be in jail. His solution is to lure to his crumbling, mortgaged ancestral estate a greedy old priest, murder him, and then take possession of the priest’s considerable riches. Of course, it all goes wrong, and the priest’s hat takes us through a mirrored maze of guilt and self-deception as the baron attempts to maintain his equanimity and social position.

A precursor of the Italian giallo genre, The Priest’s Hat was first published in 1887 in installments. Echoing the works of Dostoyevsky and Dickens, De Marchi intended this novel as an accessible yet literate exposé of contemporary Italian society with its culture of gossip, rumor, and superstition; of powerful gangs and clergy; of misleading new philosophies; a frivolous, inept, and corrupt media; and an inequitable justice system.

Luis Gómez’s Floods of the Tiber now in English

The Tiber River winds through the center of Rome. In the 16th century, the river was fundamental to the city’s life, providing water supply for drinking, washing, and industrial uses, as well as local fishing. Its rapid current powered Rome’s grain mills, which ground the flour that was the basis of its food supply. The Tiber was also the depository for tons of sewage and other refuse that the city generated daily. Yet, just as the river supported Rome’s life, it also threatened it. 

Since antiquity, the Tiber had flooded periodically, often with devastating consequences. With the city’s growing population clustered in the low-lying flood plain near the riverbanks and the increasing severity of events due to climate change, the Tiber flood of October 8, 1530 was catastrophic. It was also a bitter sequel to the traumatic Sack of Rome of May 1527.

Luis Gómez’s The Floods of the Tiber of 1531 was motivated and informed by his own experience of this disaster. It bears eloquent witness to how he used his humanist methods and scholarship to cope with personal and community crisis. Gómez provides an eyewitness account of this major environmental disaster and an example of how contemporaries analyzed the causes and consequences of such events. 

This translation by Chiara Bariviera, Pamela O. Long, and William L. North is a collective effort of different expertises ranging from Roman archaeology and topography to late ancient, medieval, and early modern history of science, technology, urbanism, and culture. 

The editors have produced a clear, accurate, and readable English version of the original 1531 Latin edition — here also transcribed in full for the first time — accompanied by an informative introduction, expert annotations, and comprehensive bibliography.

176 pages, 17 illustrations, introduction,
notes, bibliography, index.

 

Carolina Invernizio’s The Modern Sinner Published

 

Italica Press is happy to announce the next title in our Italian Crime Writers Series. 

Carolina Invernizio’s The Modern Sinner opens with a crime that will haunt the narrative and its characters beyond the last page. Invernizio creates the aristocratic femme fatale and worldly seductress named Sultana, who plays with men, bewitching them onto paths of dissolution and betrayal. Invernizio’s men are too frail to escape her or too unaware to notice her deviousness. Husbands and lovers become victims and pawns to her charms. 

As Sultana’s arch-nemesis, Invernizio invents a vengeance-seeking country girl, Anna Maria, who weaves a dangerous web to entrap her prey — a web dangerous for herself as well as for everyone else involved. 

One of the earliest examples of the serialized female crime novel, The Modern Sinner is a masterpiece of the genre. Its twists and turns entrance from chapter to chapter as the reader follows the shifting fates of two women engaged in mortal combat, each one hiding her calculations and objectives. 

Translated from the Italian, with an introduction, by Andrew Edwards.

Introduction. 258 pages.

A New Title in Italica's Italian Crime Writers Series