Added by: Maria | Karma: 3098.81 | Non-Fiction | 9 May 2008
25
In Murder of a Medici Princess, Caroline Murphy illuminates the
brilliant life and tragic death of Isabella de Medici, one of the
brightest stars in the dazzling world of Renaissance Italy, the
daughter of Duke Cosimo I, ruler of Florence and Tuscany.
Tired of the same old vampires? Check out Anne Rice's new race of undead bloodsuckers, independent of the Lestat series. Her alterna-vamp books began with Pandora, but the second of her New Tales of the Vampires, Vittorio, is truly a new beginning--a more controlled story and probably the best of her last half-dozen books.
Rice has called Vittorio her vampire version of Romeo and Juliet. The hunky Vittorio is sweet 16 and "incalculably rich" in 15th-century Italy, the epoch of the Medicis and Vittorio's favorite painter, madly passionate Filippo Lippi. Florence is to Vittorio what New Orleans is to Interview with the Vampire.
America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It
It’s the end of the world as we know it…
Someday soon, you might wake up to the call to prayer from a
muezzin. Europeans already are. "The biggest globalization success story
of recent years is not McDonald's or Microsoft but Islamism," writes
Steyn.
...much of what we loosely call the Western world will not
survive the twenty-first century, and much of it will effectively disappear
within our lifetimes, including many if not most European countries. There'll
probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the
Netherlands -
probably - just as in Istanbul there's still a building
known as Hagia Sophia, or St. Sophia's Cathedral. But it's not a cathedral;
it's merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the
Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate.
And liberals will still tell you that "diversity is our strength"—while
Talibanic enforcers cruise Greenwich Village burning books and barber shops,
the Supreme Court decides sharia law doesn’t violate the "separation of
church and state," and the Hollywood Left decides to give up on gay rights
in favor of the much safer charms of polygamy.
Italia Romantica
This book attempts to chart the vision of Italy as it was developed by the second generation English Romantic poets, influenced as they were by the malign influence of the Gothic novelists. It examines the influence of Italian writers in new English translations at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, especially on Byron, perhaps the most influential authority on Italy in his day.
It traces the awakening of a new historical awareness of an Italy apart from Rome and the Renaissance and the new use to which classical lore was put by poets as similar and yet so different as Keats and Leopardi. It examines the influence of new tourists, especially women, of landscape painting, of interests other than antiquarianism, it discusses social phenomena that influenced opinion, like lawlessness and the Roman Catholic Church. England greeted the Risorgimento with disbelief, given the poor opinion with which so many of her tourists returned from Italy, but with a sympathy born of the better knowledge of her situation that these same tourists had provided. Italy’s transformation from geographical expression to nation and acceptance in her new role as a European power was certainly helped by this long process of familiarisation.
