The Last Muslims in Italy
During Dante’s lifetime, the only Muslim city on the Italian peninsula ceased to exist. Dante does not mention Lucera Saracenorum (a Latin placename meaning “Lucera of the Saracens”) in his writings,…
Essays
Always Remember Your Name
A memoir by Andra and Tatiana Bucci. Forward by Ruth Franklin Andra and Tatiana Bucci, Always Remember Your Name, translated by Ann Goldstein. Astra House By all rights, this book…
The Jesuit
Nicola Chiaromonte, The Partisan Review, February 1948 We had been at school together, at the Collegio Massimo, the time-honored Jesuit college where the sons of the Roman middle class sit…
The Novel of Ferrara
Introduction by Jamie McKendrick to his translation of The Novel of Ferrara (W.W. Norton & Co., 2019) In short stories, novels, poems, and essays, Giorgio Bassani has composed perhaps the…
The People Next Door
As long as we live in this house there is no need for Stolpersteines, we don’t need to stumble in memory.
Advertising the Self: Formiggini’s Talking Postcards
In an era in which advertising was not yet an industry but rather an incipient trade entrusted more to imagination than anything else, the Italian publisher Angelo Fortunato Formiggini invented…
A chemist’s book changed John Barnett’s life.
The graphic artist’s Carbon illustrates an element’s journey from a star to his brain We are delighted to repost a review of John Barnett’s beautifully conceived visual meditation on the…
Aldo Braibanti: The Scandal of the Imagination
A modern anarchist outlines a new ecological horizon where man renounces the idea of primacy over other living beings. Imagination is his main instrument: when he puts it to…
The State, the Church, and the Constitution.
Piero Calamandrei’s statement at the Constitutional Assembly, March 1947 Two years after the liberation of Italy, April 25th, 1945, the Constitutional Assembly discussed how to define the relation between Church…
A Memory of Le Murate
I was released from Le Murate three days ago. In my section, there was an inmate from Prato – the nicest man, who had been “in” for the past fourteen…