Fear of Freedom: With the Essay “Fear of Painting”
Carlo Levi was a Renaissance Man without a Renaissance: A painter, a writer of essays and fiction, a physician and politician (in the order of his talents), he came of…
Books
Hospital Series
Amelia Rosselli’s Serie ospedaliera among the poet’s most haunting, imaginatively intense and formally rigorous collections, has just been published by New Directions as Hospital Series, translated by Deborah Woodard, Roberta…
On Translating Amelia Rosselli
Amelia Rosselli’s experimental approach to poetry and trilingual interweaving have only recently been discovered by readers of English. The daunting challenges of translating her work are only partly responsible for…
Bound in Venice. The First Talmud
Bound in Venice: The Serene Republic and the Dawn of the Book, Europa Editions 2013 A history of the dawn of the book coming at a time when both books…
The Pope Who Tried
During the past fifty years, most of the debate on the Catholic Church’s relationship with fascism has focused on the wartime period and the Vatican’s response to the Holocaust. Did…
Spina’s Shadow
“Darling, this is Alessandro Spina, who is trying to make Italians feel guilty about their colonial crimes.” Three months after Alessandro Spina’s death in July 2013, Ilario Bertoletti, his Italian…
The Nação in the Eternal City
James Nelson Novoa, Being the Nação in the Eternal City: New Christian Lives in Sixteenth-Century Rome (Peterborough, Ontario: Baywolf Press, 2014) James Nelson Novoa’s Being the Nação in the Eternal…
Italian Jews in the Modern Era
Marina Caffiero, Storia degli ebrei nell’Italia moderna. Dal Rinascimento alla Restaurazione. Carocci editore, Rome, 2014 Marina Caffiero’s new book offers an engaging overview of the situation of the Jews of…
Italian Jewish Women Artists in the 20th Century
Between June and October 2014, an exhibition entitled Artiste del Novecento tra visione e identità ebraica [Women Artists of the Twentieth Century/Vision and Jewish Identity] was held at the Galleria…
Venetian Ephemera
Salman on Salzberg, ‘Ephemeral City: Cheap Print and Urban Culture in Renaissance Venice’ This work on cheap print fits into a long historiographic tradition that started with such important pioneers as Robert…