Venice
Pure City
Written by Peter Ackroyd

Format: Trade Paperback, 432 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: October 25, 2011
Price: $21.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-47379-0 (0-307-47379-1)

Peter Ackroyd at his most magical and magisterial—a glittering, evocative, fascinating, story-filled portrait of Venice, the ultimate city.

The Venetians’ language and way of thinking set them aside from the rest of Italy. They are an island people, linked to the sea and to the tides rather than the land. This... Read more >

Venice
Pure City
Written by Peter Ackroyd

Format: Hardcover, 416 pages
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
On Sale: November 2, 2010
Price: $37.50
ISBN: 978-0-385-53152-8 (0-385-53152-4)

The Venetians’ language and way of thinking set them aside from the rest of Italy. They are an island people, linked to the sea and to the tides rather than the land. This latest work from the incomparable Peter Ackroyd, like a magic gondola, transports its readers to that sensual and... Read more >

Sicily
Three Thousand Years of Human History
Written by Sandra Benjamin

Format: Trade Paperback, 512 pages
Publisher: Steerforth
On Sale: December 18, 2007
Price: $19.95
ISBN: 978-1-58642-131-1 (1-58642-131-X)

The rich, recorded history of Sicily reaches back for more than three thousand years. Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Goths, Byzantines, Muslims, Normans, Hohenstaufens, Spaniards, Bourbons, the Savoy Kingdom of Italy and the modern era have all held sway, and left lasting influences on the island’s culture and architecture. And yet no contemporary... Read more >

Marco Polo
From Venice to Xanadu
Written by Laurence Bergreen

Format: Trade Paperback, 432 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: October 21, 2008
Price: $18.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-7880-6 (1-4000-7880-6)

As the first European to travel extensively throughout Asia, Marco Polo was the earliest bridge between East and West. His famous journeys took him across the boundaries of the known world, along the dangerous Silk Road, and into the court of Kublai Kahn, where he won the trust of the most... Read more >

The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy

Written by Jacob Burckhardt
Afterword by Hajo Holborn
Introduction by Peter Gay

Format: Trade Paperback, 432 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: April 9, 2002
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-75926-0 (0-375-75926-3)

Published in 1860, Burckhardt’s great work redefined our sense of the European past, wholly reinterpreting what has since been known simply as the Italian Renaissance. With unsurpassed erudition, Burckhardt illuminates a world of artistic and cultural ferment, innovation, and discovery; of revived humanism; of fierce tensions between church and empire; and... Read more >

Sprezzatura
50 Ways Italian Genius Shaped the World
Written by Peter D'Epiro and Mary Desmond Pinkowish

Format: Trade Paperback, 416 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: October 2, 2001
Price: $17.95
ISBN: 978-0-385-72019-9 (0-385-72019-X)

A witty, erudite celebration of fifty great Italian cultural achievements that have significantly influenced Western civilization from the authors of What Are the Seven Wonders of the World?

“Sprezzatura,” or the art of effortless mastery, was coined in 1528 by Baldassare Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier. No one has demonstrated... Read more >

Lieutenant Nun
Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World
Written by Catalina De Erauso

Format: Trade Paperback, 128 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press
On Sale: June 30, 1997
Price: $18.00
ISBN: 978-0-8070-7073-4 (0-8070-7073-4)

Named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 1996

One of the earliest known autobiographies by a woman, this is the extraordinary tale of Catalina de Erauso, who in 1599 escaped from a Basque convent dressed as a man and went on to live one of the most wildly fantastic... Read more >

Machiavelli in Hell

Written by Sebastian De Grazia

Format: Trade Paperback, 512 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: January 13, 1994
Price: $18.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-74342-2 (0-679-74342-1)

In this intellectual biography Sebastian de Grazia presents a new vision of Machiavelli that evokes, with uncanny precision, the great Florentine thinker's presence. After providing an engrossing account of Machiavelli's childhood and the period following his imprisonment and torture, the book turns to an examination of The Prince. The details of... Read more >

Lucia
A Venetian Life in the Age of Napleon
Written by Andrea Di Robilant

Format: Trade Paperback, 384 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: February 10, 2009
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-9511-7 (1-4000-9511-5)

In 1787, the beautiful Lucia is married off to Alvise Mocenigo, scion of one of the most powerful Venetian families. But their life as a golden couple will be suddenly transformed when Venice falls to Bonaparte. We witness Lucia's painful series of miscarriages and the pressure on her to produce an... Read more >

A Venetian Affair
A True Tale of Forbidden Love in the 18th Century
Written by Andrea Di Robilant

Format: Trade Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: April 12, 2005
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-72617-0 (0-375-72617-9)

In the waning days of Venice’s glory in the mid-1700s, Andrea Memmo was scion to one the city’s oldest patrician families. At the age of twenty-four he fell passionately in love with sixteen-year-old Giustiniana Wynne, the beautiful, illegitimate daughter of a Venetian mother and British father. Because of their dramatically different... Read more >

Sicilian Lives

Written by Danilo Dolci

Format: Trade Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: Pantheon
On Sale: December 12, 1981
Price: $19.00
ISBN: 978-0-394-74938-9 (0-394-74938-3)

Read more >

The Birth of Venus
A Novel
Written by Sarah Dunant

Format: Trade Paperback, 448 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
On Sale: November 30, 2004
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-8129-6897-2 (0-8129-6897-2)

2005 BOOK SENSE BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD, ADULT NON-FICTION

Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous cloth merchant, brings a young painter back from northern Europe to decorate the chapel walls in the family’s Florentine palazzo. A child of the Renaissance, with a precocious mind and a... Read more >

The Professor of Secrets
Mystery, Medicine, and Alchemy in Renaissance Italy
Written by William Eamon

Format: Hardcover, 368 pages
Publisher: National Geographic
On Sale: July 20, 2010
Price: $26.00
ISBN: 978-1-4262-0650-4 (1-4262-0650-X)

In the tradition of Galileo’s Daughter and Brunelleschi’s Dome, this exciting story illuminates the captivating world of the late Renaissance–in this case its plagues, remedies, and alchemy–through the life of Leonardo Fioravanti, a brilliant, remarkably forward-thinking, and utterly unconventional doctor. Fioravanti’s marvelous cures and talent for self-aggrandizement earned him the adoration... Read more >

The Force of Reason

Written by Oriana Fallaci

Format: Hardcover, 290 pages
Publisher: Rizzoli
On Sale: March 7, 2006
Price: $19.95
ISBN: 978-0-8478-2753-4 (0-8478-2753-4)

Oriana Fallaci is back with her much-anticipated follow up to The Rage and the Pride, her powerful post-September 11 manifesto. The genesis for The Force of Reason was a postscript entitled Due Anni Dopo (Two Years Later), which was intended as a brief appendix to the thirtieth edition of The Rage... Read more >

The Rage and the Pride

Written by Oriana Fallaci

Format: Hardcover, 168 pages
Publisher: Rizzoli
On Sale: October 25, 2002
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-0-8478-2504-2 (0-8478-2504-3)

With her well-known courage Oriana Fallaci faces the themes unchained by the Islamic terrorism: the contrast and, in her opinion, incompatibility between the Islamic world and the Western world; the global reality of the Jihad and the lack of response, and the lenience of the West.

The text is enriched by... Read more >

The Mafia
History and Legend
Written by Marco Gasparini
Translated by Brian Eskenazi

Format: Hardcover, 208 pages
Publisher: Flammarion
On Sale: October 11, 2011
Price: $45.00
ISBN: 978-2-08-030150-5 (2-08-030150-0)

An illustrated history of the Mafia, focusing on this highly developed criminal organization both as a cult subject and an important social phenomenon. Movie classics like The Godfather epitomize our fascination with the underworld of the Mafia, conjuring images of cigar-smoking dons and shoot-outs in pizzerias. But behind the romantic myths... Read more >

The Confident Hope of a Miracle
The True Story of the Spanish Armada
Written by Neil Hanson

Format: Trade Paperback, 512 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: February 14, 2006
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-7817-2 (1-4000-7817-2)

The Confident Hope of a Miracle is a gripping account of the defeat of the Spanish Armada—the defining international event of the Elizabethan age. In 1588, determined to reclaim England for the Catholic Church, King Philip II of Spain launched a fleet of huge castle-crowned galleons that stretched for miles across... Read more >

The Struggle for Europe
The Turbulent History of a Divided Continent 1945 to the Present
Written by William I. Hitchcock

Format: Trade Paperback, 560 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: February 3, 2004
Price: $18.00
ISBN: 978-0-385-49799-2 (0-385-49799-7)

From the ashes of World War II to the advent of the Euro, the definitive history of the postwar rebirth of Europe by one of our finest young historians.

After a century of war, genocide, and ideological rivalry, Europe has at last emerged as a continent striving for stability, tolerance, democracy and... Read more >

I Wish I'd Been There (R)
Book Two: European History
Edited by Byron Hollinshead and Theodore K. Rabb

Format: Trade Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: June 2, 2009
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-27764-0 (0-307-27764-X)

“What is the scene or incident in European history that you would like to have witnessed-and why?”

In this companion to I Wish I'd Been There: Twenty Historians Bring to Life the Dramatic Events that Changed America, some of our finest historical writers now turn their attention to Europe, with lively and... Read more >

Apollo's Angels
A History of Ballet
Written by Jennifer Homans

Format: Trade Paperback, 672 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
On Sale: November 29, 2011
Price: $20.00
ISBN: 978-0-8129-6874-3 (0-8129-6874-3)

Finalist, 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
Named one of “The 10 Best Books of 2010” by the editors of the New York Times Book Review
A 2011 Choice "Outstanding Academic Title"
A 2012 American Library Association Notable Book for Adults (Nonfiction)

For more than four hundred years, the art of ballet has... Read more >

They Shall Not Pass
The British Battalion at Jarama - The Spanish Civil War
Written by Ben Hughes

Format: Hardcover, 288 pages
Publisher: Osprey Publishing
On Sale: July 19, 2011
Price: $25.95
ISBN: 978-1-84908-549-6 (1-84908-549-8)

In 1937 a group of idealistic British volunteers sailed from England to fight the dark threat of dictatorship in Spain. In the olive groves of Jarama they achieved the first victory against Franco’s army. It was Fascism’s first defeat. Hardly remembered today, it was possibly the crucial military turning point of... Read more >

Barcelona

Written by Robert Hughes

Format: Trade Paperback, 592 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: March 9, 1993
Price: $21.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-74383-5 (0-679-74383-9)

This is Hughes's monumentally informed and irresistibly opinionated guide to the most un-Spanish city in Spain. Hughes scrolls through Barcelona's often violent history, tells the stories of its kings, poets, magnates, and revolutionaries, and ushers readers through municipal landmarks that range from Antoni Gaudi's sublimely surreal cathedral to a postmodern restaurant... Read more >

Goya

Written by Robert Hughes

Format: Trade Paperback, 448 pages
Publisher: Knopf
On Sale: November 7, 2006
Price: $29.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-71128-2 (0-375-71128-7)

Robert Hughes, who has stunned us with comprehensive works on subjects as sweeping and complex as the history of Australia (The Fatal Shore), the modern art movement (The Shock of the New), the nature of American art (American Visions), and the nature of America itself as seen through its art (The... Read more >

Rome
A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History
Written by Robert Hughes

Format: Trade Paperback, 512 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: October 30, 2012
Price: $18.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-71168-8 (0-375-71168-6)

From Robert Hughes, one of the greatest art and cultural critics of our time, comes a sprawling, comprehensive, and deeply personal history of Rome—as a city, as an empire, and as an origin of Western art and civilization.

Starting on a personal note, Hughes takes us to the Rome he first encountered... Read more >

Rome
A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History
Written by Robert Hughes

Format: Hardcover, 512 pages
Publisher: Knopf
On Sale: November 1, 2011
Price: $35.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-26844-0 (0-307-26844-6)

From Robert Hughes, one of the greatest art and cultural critics of our time, comes a sprawling, comprehensive, and deeply personal history of Rome—as city, as empire, and, crucially, as an origin of Western art and civilization, two subjects about which Hughes has spent his life writing and thinking.

Starting on a... Read more >