'Thus she was decapitated, and this was the end to which she was brought by her unbridled lusts.' For over two centuries after Boccaccio's groundbreaking Decameron, the Italian novella exercised a crucial influence over European prose fiction. With thirty-nine stories by nineteen authors, many translated for the first time, this anthology presents tales from the whole genre and period. Here we meet a rich cast of humble peasants and shrewd craftsmen, frustrated wi...

The 'Canzoniere', a sequence of sonnets and other verse forms, were written over a period of about 40 years. They describe Petrarch's intense love for Laura, whom he first met in Avignon in 1327, and her effect on him after she died in 1348. The collection is an examination of the poet's growing spiritual crisis, and also explores important contemporary issues such as the role of the papacy and religion.

Judicially condemned in 1857 as offensive to public morality, The Flowers of Evil is now regarded as the most influential volume of poetry published in the nineteenth century. Torn between intense sensuality and profound spiritual yearning, racked by debt and disease, Baudelaire transformed his own experience of Parisian life into a work of universal significance. With his unflinching examination of the dark aspects and unconventional manifestations of sexuality, his pioneering portrayal o...

SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR * HENRY IV * THE MOUNTAIN GIANTS Pirandello ranks with Strindberg, Brecht, and Beckett as a seminal figure in modern drama. Innovative and influential, he broke decisively with the conventions of realist theatre to foreground the tensions between art and reality. In his best known play, six characters, imagined but then abandoned by their author, intrude on the rehearsals of a provincial theatre company in an attempt to play out their ...

'Live now and listen, do not wait in vain Until tomorrow; pluck life's rose today.' Joachim du Bellay and Pierre de Ronsard are two of the major sixteenth-century French poets and leaders of the extraordinary group known as 'La Pléiade'. Determined to create a national vernacular literature, the Pléiade poets profited from an intense study of Greek and Roman models and from a creative use of classical mythology to produce a body of verse that reflects the vigour and variet...

The Vita Nuova remains a central document in European culture’s examination of love and the self. It is a hundred and fifty years since Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s groundbreaking version of the Vita Nuova. Now Anthony Mortimer, already acclaimed as translator of Cavalcanti, Petrarch and Michelangelo, produces a verse translation that avoids Rossetti’s disturbing archaisms but preserves a lyric immediacy worthy of the original. This is a Vita Nuova for the twenty-first century. Vita Nuova is h...

A superb translation of Dante’s classic tale that chronicles the poet’s journey through the nine circles of Hell, a dual-language edition vividly rendered and with an introduction and commentary by National Book Award–winning translator Allen Mandelbaum“Exactly what we have waited for these years, a Dante with clarity, eloquence, terror, and profoundly moving depths.”—Robert Fagles, Princeton UniversityIn the Inferno, renowned tran...

Describing Dante's descent into Hell midway through his life with Virgil as a guide, Inferno depicts a cruel underworld in which desperate figures are condemned to eternal damnation for committing one or more of seven deadly sins. As he descends through nine concentric circles of increasingly agonising torture, Dante encounters doomed souls including the pagan Aeneas, the liar Odysseus, the suicide Cleopatra, and his own political enemies, damned for their deceit. Led by leering demons, th...

This dictionary assembles 2,513 English proverbs and their Italian equivalents. Equivalent proverbs are those which express the same concept, be it literally, such as "Love is blind" = "L'amore è cieco," or with completely different words, such as"Every cloud has a silver lining" = "Non tutto il male viene per nuocere."The Dictionary is a very useful reference tool for scholars of the two languages, for researchers working in various associated fields such as linguistics, literature...

Flashcards for English learners of Italian - e studenti italiani del inglese1st Edition: 500 examples"Two sides of the same coin"- "Due facce della stessa medaglia""A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step"- "*Un viaggio di mille miglia comincia con un solo passo"'Learning' is 'Changing behaviour by Practice', and anyone can do it!- '*L'apprendimento' è 'Cambiamento del comportamento con la pratica', e chiunque può farlo!

"The enjoyment of The Divine Comedy is a continuous process," observed T.S. Eliot. "It is not necessary to understand the meaning first to enjoy the poetry...our enjoyment of the poetry makes us want to understand the meaning."Arguably the greatest single poem ever written, The Divine Comedy presents Dante Alighieri's all-encompassing vision of the three realms of Christian afterlife. In the Purgatorio, Dante struggles up the terrac...

This brilliant new verse translation by Allen Mandelbaum captures the consummate beauty of the third and last part of Dante's Divine Comedy. The Paradiso is a luminous poem of love and light, of optics, angelology, polemics, prayer, prophecy, and transcendent experience. As Dante ascends to the Celestial Rose, in the tenth and final heaven, all the spectacle and splendor of a great poet's vision now becomes accessible to the modern reader in this highly acclaimed, superb dual language edit...