**One of The New Yorker's Best Books of the Year"A lively book.…[Luzzi] brilliantly sets the operatic stage of vibrant, violent Renaissance Florence and brings to life the characters who helped resurrect Botticelli." —Max Norman, Wall Street Journal**Some five hundred years ago, Sandro Botticelli, a painter of humble origin, created works of unearthly beauty. A star of Florence’s art world, he was commissioned by a member of the city’s powerful Medici fami...

**One of The New Yorker's Best Books of 2025How a Florentine orphanage rescued thousands of children and revolutionized childhood education amid the splendor of Renaissance art.**The story begins with the abandonment of the newborn Agata Smeralda on February 5, 1445, in Florence’s Hospital of the Innocents, the first—but certainly not the last—child to be left at its doors. In an era when children were frequently abandoned, often trafficked or left to die on the st...

**"Perhaps this lovely little Liveright edition deserves to become the new standard." —Steve Donoghue, Open Letters ReviewDante’s first masterpiece in an enticing new translation by one of our most beloved teachers of Italian literature and culture.**Part love story, part instruction manual, part spiritual journey, Dante’s “little book,” the Vita Nuova, has had a profound and far-reaching influence on global culture and is considered by many to be the perf...

"A funny and often moving family history that opens onto wider vistas that he knows and loves equally well—the Italian cultural and political landscape." — Ross King, New York Times–bestselling authorThe child of Italian immigrants and an award-winning scholar of Italian literature, Joseph Luzzi straddles these two perspectives to link his family's dramatic story to Italy's north-south divide, its quest for a unifying lan...

The life and times of Dante’s soaring poetic allegory of the soul’s redemptive journey toward GodWritten during his exile from Florence in the early 1300s, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy describes the poet’s travels through hell, purgatory, and paradise, exploring the state of the human soul after death. His poema sacro, sacred poem, profoundly influenced Renaissance writers and artists such as Giovanni Boccaccio and Sandro Botticelli and was ven...

In this comprehensive guide, some of the world's leading scholars consider the issues, films, and filmmakers that have given Italian cinema its enduring appeal. Readers will explore the work of such directors as Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Roberto Rossellini as well as a host of subjects including the Italian silent screen, the political influence of Fascism on the movies, lesser known genres such as the giallo (horror film) and Spaghetti Western, and the role of...

Explores the poetics and aesthetics of the Italian art film in Rossellini, Antonioni, Fellini, and other groundbreaking directors.A Cinema of Poetry brings Italian film studies into dialogue with fields outside its usual purview by showing how films can contribute to our understanding of aesthetic questions that stretch back to Homer. Joseph Luzzi considers the relation between film and literature, especially the cinematic adaptation of literary sources an...

A true historical “detective story” full of insight about how we look at art―and the artists and eras that produced itSome five hundred years ago, Sandro Botticelli, a painter of humble origin, created work of unearthly beauty. An intimate associate of Florence’s unofficial rulers, the Medici, he was commissioned by a member of their family to execute a near-impossible project: to illustrate all one hundred cantos of The Divine Comedy by the city’s greates...

Esteemed professor Joseph Luzzi addresses the place of classic literature in the modern world with this riveting series of lectures. Advocating "the art of reading" as a way to answer essential questions of day-to-day life, Luzzi delves into the works of such literary titans as Plato, Shakespeare, and Virginia Woolf. By doing so, he tackles such age-old questions as "How do we fall in love?" and "How do we confront evil?"

The director of Italian studies at Bard College, Professor Joseph Luzzi, leads a comprehensive overview of Italian culture. Beginning in the fabled realm of Renaissance art and concluding with the sweeping transformations of present-day Italy, Professor Luzzi examines the Italian mystique and answers a number of intriguing questions: Is there a distinctly "Italian" way of looking at the world? To whom do Italian Renaissance treasures truly belong? Could the United States as known today exi...

How a Florentine orphanage rescued thousands of children and revolutionized childhood education amid the splendor of Renaissance art.The story begins with the abandonment of the newborn Agata Smeralda on February 5, 1445, in Florence’s Hospital of the Innocents, the first—but certainly not the last—child to be left at its doors. In an era when children were frequently abandoned, often trafficked or left to die on the streets, an orphanage devoted to their care and ...