eBook downloads, eBook resources & eBook authors
The Italian project 1 is the first level of a modern multimedia course of Italian language. Suitable to adolescent and adult students. It provides a balanced information, with pleasant and amusing conversation and useful grammatical examples. Introduces students to modern Italy and its culture.
For much of the twentieth century the Mediterranean was a colonized sea. Italy's Sea: Empire and Nation in the Mediterranean (1895-1945) reintegrates Italy, one of the least studied imperial states, into the history of European colonialism. It takes a critical approach to the concept of the Mediterranean in the period of Italian expansion and examines how within and through the Mediterranean Italians navigated issues of race, nation and migration troubling them at home as well as transnational questions about sovereignty, identity, and national belonging created by the decline and collapse of the Ottoman empire in North Africa, the Balkans, and the eastern Mediterranean, or Levant. While most studies of Italian colonialism center on the encounter in Africa, Italy's Sea describes another set of colonial identities that accrued in and around the Aegean region of the Mediterranean, ones linked not to resettlement projects or to the rhetoric of reclaiming Roman empire, but to cosmopolitan imaginaries of Magna Graecia, the medieval Christian crusades, the Venetian and Genoese maritime empires, and finally, of religious diversity and transnational Levantine Jewish communities that could help render cultural and political connections between the Italian nation at home and the overseas empire in the Mediterranean. Using postcolonial critique to interpret local archival and oral sources as well as Italian colonial literature, film, architecture, and urban planning, the book brings to life a history of mediterraneita or Mediterraneanness in Italian culture, one with both liberal and fascist associations, and enriches our understanding of how contemporary Italy-as well as Greece-may imagine their relationships to Europe and the Mediterranean today. --
Mussolini’s National Project in Argentina offers a new look at the theoretical questions surrounding the promotion of a national project within another nation-state. Using the Italian project in Argentina as its case study, it highlights the active role emigrants can play in the national discourse when provided with a free public space abroad. Informed by both its Old World roots and New World realities, the Italian community articulated their own definition of the nation which transcended the political debates of its day. /span
In the early development of the modern Italian state, individual orphanages were a reflection of the intertwining of politics and charity. Nearly half of the children who lived in the cities of the late Italian Renaissance were under fifteen years of age. Grinding poverty, unstable families, and the death of a parent could make caring for these young children a burden. Many were abandoned, others orphaned. At a time when political rulers fashioned themselves as the "fathers" of society, these cast-off children presented a very immediate challenge and opportunity. In Bologna and Florence, government and private institutions pioneered orphanages to care for the growing number of homeless children. Nicholas Terpstra discusses the founding and management of these institutions, the procedures for placing children into them, the children's daily routine and education, and finally their departure from these homes. He explores the role of the city-state and considers why Bologna and Florence took different paths in operating the orphanages. Terpstra finds that Bologna's orphanages were better run, looked after the children more effectively, and were more successful in returning their wards to society as productive members of the city's economy. Florence's orphanages were larger and harsher, and made little attempt to reintegrate children into society. Based on extensive archival research and individual stories, Abandoned Children of the Italian Renaissance demonstrates how gender and class shaped individual orphanages in each city's network and how politics, charity, and economics intertwined in the development of the early modern state.
Simple Italian Cookery is an introduction to Italian home food. Numerous classic recipes are presented that are bound to make any gastronomical fan salivate and try out the these wonderful recipes!
The papers collected in this volume are selected as a sample of the progress in Natural Language Processing (NLP) performed within the Italian NLP community and especially attested by the PARLI project. PARLI (Portale per l’Accesso alle Risorse in Lingua Italiana) is a project partially funded by the Ministero Italiano per l’Università e la Ricerca (PRIN 2008) from 2008 to 2012 for monitoring and fostering the harmonic growth and coordination of the activities of Italian NLP. It was proposed by various teams of researchers working in Italian universities and research institutions. According to the spirit of the PARLI project, most of the resources and tools created within the project and here described are freely distributed and they did not terminate their life at the end of the project itself, hoping they could be a key factor in future development of computational linguistics.
Ecocriticism and film studies unite in this examination of five Italian films and the environmental questions they raise. Entangled in the hybrid fields of ecomedia studies and material ecocriticism, Elena Past examines five Italian films shot on location and ponders the complex relationships that the production crews developed with the filming locations and the nonhuman cast members. She uses these films—Red Desert (1964), The Winds Blows Round (2005), Gomorrah (2008), Le quattro volte (2010), and Return to the Aeolian Islands (2010)—as case studies to explore pressing environmental questions such as cinema’s dependence on hydrocarbons, the toxic waste crisis in the region of Campania, and our reliance on the nonhuman world. Dynamic and unexpected actors emerge as the subjects of each chapter: playful goats, erupting volcanoes, airborne dust particles, fluid petroleum, and even the sound of silence. Based on interviews with crew members and close readings of the films themselves, Italian Ecocinema Beyond the Human theorizes how filmmaking practice—from sound recording to location scouting to managing a production—helps uncover cinema’s ecological footprint and its potential to open new perspectives on the nonhuman world. “[Past] uniquely and innovatively combines film studies and material ecocriticism with a focus on Italy. Such weaving of tales brings the films to life and reads them as ecological documents and Italian stories.” —Heather I. Sullivan, author of The Intercontextuality of Self and Nature in Ludwig Tieck’s Early Works “A timely and incisive study that interrogates a new, though growing, trend in film criticism and makes an important and rich contribution to Italian film studies, Italian cultural studies, and ecocriticism.” —Bernadette Luciano, author (with Susanna Scarparo) of Reframing Italy: New Trends in Italian Women’s Filmmaking “Part memoir, part close analysis of the films themselves, and illustrated with numerous excellent frame grabs, Past’s book casts a dreamlike spell as it contemplates the past, present, and future of the cinema and moves smoothly between environmental issues and aesthetic and practical concerns.” —Choice
Books VI-X of Livy's monumental work trace Rome's fortunes from its near collapse after defeat by the Gauls in 386 bc to its emergence, in a matter of decades, as the premier power in Italy, having conquered the city-state of Samnium in 293 bc. In this fascinating history, events are described not simply in terms of partisan politics, but through colourful portraits that bring the strengths, weaknesses and motives of leading figures such as the noble statesman Camillus and the corrupt Manlius vividly to life. While Rome's greatest chronicler intended his history to be a memorial to former glory, he also had more didactic aims - hoping that readers of his account could learn from the past ills and virtues of the city.
"The first Italian translation of the Book of Common Prayer was made in 1608 by William Bedell (the chaplain to James I's ambassador in Venice) with the help of Fulgenzio Micanzio and Paolo Sarpi. This translation was part of an English propaganda plan to instigate a schism in the Church of Venice, at a time of conflict between the court of Rome and the Venetian Republic. This chapter reconstructs the relationships between Sarpi and Micanzio and the English embassy in Venice. As far as we know, Bedell's translation remained a manuscript with no known copies extant"--
In the late nineteenth century, Italians and Eastern European Jews joined millions of migrants around the globe who left their countries to take advantage of the demand for unskilled labor in rapidly industrializing nations, including the United States. Many Americans of northern and western European ancestry regarded these newcomers as biologically and culturally inferior--unassimilable--and by 1924, the United States had instituted national origins quotas to curtail immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Weaving together political, social, and transnational history, Maddalena Marinari examines how, from 1882 to 1965, Italian and Jewish reformers profoundly influenced the country's immigration policy as they mobilized against the immigration laws that marked them as undesirable. Strategic alliances among restrictionist legislators in Congress, a climate of anti-immigrant hysteria, and a fickle executive branch often left these immigrants with few options except to negotiate and accept political compromises. As they tested the limits of citizenship and citizen activism, however, the actors at the heart of Marinari's story shaped the terms of debate around immigration in the United States in ways we still reckon with today.
