Italian Crime Writers

We’re happy to say that our new Italian Crime Writers Series continues to grow and has started to receive some nice reviews. 

A Conspiracy of Talkers, by Gaetano Savatteri, gets a fine review by Andrew and Suzanne Edwards in the 10 September 2021 issue of Times of Sicily. 

Agony, by Federico De Roberto, is reviewed by David Hebblethwaite in the August 22, 2021 issue of David’s Book World. 

The first volume in the series, Quo Vadis, Baby?, by Grazia Verasani, has already received high praise by Jeanne Bonner in the December 2018 issue of Three Percent.

All these titles are available in hardcover, paperback, and digital editions, at very reasonable prices. Please investigate!

Catalog 59 Now Online

Our Italica Press Catalog 59, for Summer 2021, is now available and ready for download. It contains eleven new and recently published titles, plus our complete backlist.

As we emerge from an extended year of Covid lockdowns, this new season offers a rich selection of medieval and Renaissance texts, history, and modern Italian fiction. We’ve also now completed two ongoing series and have launched a new one.

We are pleased to announce the publication of several important new medieval and Renaissance titles. The first, a new volume in our Studies in Art & History, is Irving Lavin’s The Art of Commemoration in the Renaissance, his Slade Lectures at Oxford, newly edited by Marilyn Aronberg Lavin.

Catherine M. Jones and William W. Kibler offer the first modern English translation of Huon of Bordeaux, a perennial favorite since its first appearance in the thirteenth century as a French chanson de geste. 

We are also very pleased to present James A. Palmer’s first complete English translation of The Chronicle of an Anonymous Roman: Rome, Italy, and Latin Christendom, c.1325–1360. Available previously only in partial versions focusing on Cola di Rienzo, the Anonimo Romano’s work is now published in its entirety with introduction, notes, index, and bibliography.

The next two volumes in our Documentary History of Naples complete that series. Rabun M. Taylor presents Ancient Naples: A Documentary History: Origins to c.350 CE, the first comprehensive survey of ancient Naples in the English language, tracing the history of the city from its origins into late antiquity. 

Charlotte Nichols & James H. Mc Gregor’s Renaissance Naples: A Documentary History, 1400–1600 offers the first English-language collection of sources to treat the city of Naples from the end of the medieval into the early modern period.

Thomas F. Coffey and Maryjane Dunn have completed the first English translation of The Sermons and Liturgy of Saint James: Book I of the Liber Sancti Jacobi. This is the fifth and final of a series publishing modern English translations of and commentary on the Codex Calixtinus in our 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 on the battle of Lepanto in 1571 and its contexts. 

Finally, we’ve published four new titles in our Modern Italian Fiction series. The first is New Italian Voices, translated and edited by Cinzia Sartini Blum and Deborah L. Contrada. This major new collection includes accomplished, award-winning Italian writers from India and Syria, Eastern Europe, North and sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Italy.

Ivy, by Nobel Prize winning novelist Grazia Deledda, has been translated from the Italian, with introduction, by Mary Ann Frese Witt and Martha Witt. It is part of our ongoing project to publish Deledda’s corpus.

The next two works are part of our new series of Italian Crime Writers. The first is Agony, the first English-language translation, by Andrew Edwards, of Federico De Roberto’s Spasimo, a psychological-detective novel set in 19th-century Lausanne. De Roberto, a master of verismo, is celebrated today for his acute political, social, and psychological insights. 

The second moves to the closing days of World War II in Sicily with A Conspiracy of Talkers by Gaetano Savatteri, translated by Steve Eaton. American Lieutenant Benjamin Adano investigates some missing U.S. Army trucks, while the Carabinieri craft a conspiracy to implicate an innocent man for a mayor’s murder and to protect the dead man’s enemies. 

 

Huon of Bordeaux published

We are pleased to announce the publication of Huon of Bordeaux in its first modern English translation by Catherine M. Jones and William W. Kibler.

The adventures of Huon of Bordeaux have been perennial favorites since their first appearance in the thirteenth century as a French chanson de geste. Within decades there were spin-offs and a prequel. The story was reprinted, popularized, and translated from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. It became a staple of children’s literature as well as the basis for theatrical and operatic works. By the twentieth century, it had become the inspiration for fantasy writers.

Jones and Kibler’s verse translation sings with grace, humor, and wit. For both teaching and for pure literary enjoyment, this first modern English translation of Huon of Bordeaux will be a major complement to the corpus of medieval French epic literature. 

“Huon of Bordeaux is on a much higher level. We do not feel that it is simply being made up out of the author’s head. It has its roots in legend and folklore, without which it is hard for romance to have the necessary solidity.” 

— C. S. Lewis

First modern English translation.
Introduction, notes, bibliography, 
glossary, and list of characters.
354 pp.

Federico De Roberto’s “Agony” to be published in English, January 1, 2021

Italica Press is happy to announce the forthcoming publication (January 1, 2021) of the first English translation of Federico De Roberto’s classic detective novel, Agony (Spasimo), translated, with an introduction, by Andrew Edwards.

The beautiful, young Countess Fiorenza d’Arda has died dramatically at her villa near Lake Geneva. Judge François Ferpierre, the senior magistrate assigned to Lausanne’s central court, arrives to investigate whether it was murder  or suicide. In either case, who is responsible? A diverse set of characters — including two Russian anarchists and a melancholy young poet, each struggling with their own complex moral, political and artistic dilemmas — all become suspects. Ferpierre works on shifting ground as each new revelation uncovers another aspect of the case, another quandary shedding new light on intertwining motivations. 

Agony is the first English-language translation of Federico De Roberto’s Spasimo, a psychological-detective novel. Here, for the first time, a Sicilian author has written a detective procedural. De Roberto, a master of verismo, is celebrated today for his acute political, social, and psychological insights.  His work was held in high esteem by Leonardo Sciascia, who deemed De Roberto’s I Viceré the greatest Italian novel after Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi.

“If we are who we are today, we owe it in part to characters just like those portrayed in the novels of De Roberto.” 
Stefania Auci, author of I Leoni di Sicilia, La Repubblica

“In entering the ‘human abyss’ … chasing clues even in the most inaccessible recesses of the psyche … giving an account of all this, De Roberto as usual is a true master.”
Salvatore Ferlita, La Repubblica

Please have a look, here.

Irving Lavin’s Art of Commemoration Published

We are happy to announce the publication of Irving Lavin’s The Art of Commemoration in the Renaissance. 

In the early 1980s, Irving Lavin was invited to deliver The Slade Lectures at Oxford University, and he took it as an opportunity to develop an idea he had long considered but never articulated: that the Italian fifteenth-century revival of ancient art was an outward sign of fundamental changes in humanity’s perception of the inner self. The change started when the individual emerged from the Middle Ages and began to exhibit a previously unknown awareness of the past as opposed to the present. The individual became a person who could make choices about existence on the basis of a new internal consciousness.

What the Renaissance called the “new man” chose what he saw in the classical world as of a higher culture and, having absorbed and transformed it, adopted it. The new mode of being not only transformed human actions, it also became the basis for a new manifestation in the arts in a style we term “Renaissance.”

To develop this idea, in what Irving Lavin called The Art of Commemoration in the Renaissance, he studied the Renaissance contribution under several rubrics that form the basis of this collection. Revising and developing through the years and until his death in 2019, Irving Lavin continued to expand, contract, and update this extravagant array of objects and ideas. Chapters include:

1. Memory and the Sense of Self: On the Role of Memory in Psychological Theory from Antiquity to Giambattista Vico
2. On the Sources and Meaning of the Renaissance Portrait Bust
3. On Illusion and Allusion in Italian Sixteenth-Century Portrait Busts
4. Great Men Past and Present
5. Equestrian Monuments: The Indomitable Horseman
6. Collective Commemoration and the Family Chapel.

These essays have now been edited in their final form, with updated notes and bibliography, by Marilyn Aronberg Lavin. Please have a look here.