A study of the way in which Vesuvius and the excavations in the Bay of Naples in 1738 and afterwards became a potent political and emotional vehicle for artists, intellectuals, Grand Tourist... read more
Despite its often fraught encounters with democracy, science and secular culture, the Catholic Church's story in the modern era is one of remarkable survival.
One of the great patrons of the Renaissance, creator of perhaps the most remarkable library outside the Vatican, the Duke of Urbino was also the most successful and feared mercenary of the a... read more
This book was in our summer catalogue but we include it (exceptionally) in the present one too because it is outstanding. As in her 'Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire' (200... read more
This slim volume came out in the autumn and has been picked up so swiftly each time it arrives in the shop that we've hardly been able to keep it in stock...
The Tyrrhenian Sea to be precise: AG drifts down the western coast of Tuscany, Lazio and Campania, and on past Naples and the Amalfi coast to northern Sicily, spilling capers, lemons, ricott... read more
Wildly delicious, deliciously straightforward - a celebration of good ingredients, sluiced with new olive oil and nipped with a pinch of salt...The beautiful farmhouse of Arniano - Amber's f... read more
Eye-stretching and ebullient examples of Italian Brutalism - many very beautiful - from the publishing team that brought us Soviet Bus Stops a few years ago and other architectural wonders.
The author went to Venice in 1957, aged 25, to have fun for a season among the rich and glam. Written with 67 years' hindsight, this memoir is a vivid evocation of a vanished era.
From the Alps to the Adriatic, through Ferrara, Mantova, Parma, Cremona, Pavia and Turin. Those who read Helena Attlee's recent Lev's Violin will know something of its historical use, but no... read more
When a young woman in Renaissance Italy is taken by her husband, the Duke of Ferrara, to a remote villa, she realises he intends to kill her... Richly told, by the author of Hamnet.
A marvellous biography of this clever, brilliant, opportunistic, amoral, inquisitive man - Damrosch's erudition serves his notorious subject very well.
Howard (1907-1987) served as an intelligence officer in WW2 throughout the Italian campaign. He married Lelia Caetani of Ninfa, where Bassani wrote a large part of The Garden of the Finzi Co... read more
MH constructs an enthralling narrative of Vatican intrigue by drawing on Cardinal Ippolito d'Este's records of the papal conclave of 1559. She shows how both the papacy and the political fat... read more
Patrick Leigh Fermor held that baroque architecture in Italy could never have existed without pasta in all its multitudinous and beguiling forms... Drawing on a decade and a half of living i... read more
A villa with a Roman aqueduct in the garden that famously belonged to Princess Zenaida Wolkonsky, whose salon included Gogol, Donizetti, Thorvaldsen, Stendhal and Sir Walter Scott. The autho... read more
It was the biggest seaborne landing in history; a difficult campaign, not least because of the heat. Its success was hard-won, and crucial to the course of the war.
A superb narrative of the 'underside' of the Italian Renaissance: the Genoese and Neapolitans; the women writers, Jewish merchants, mercenaries, engineers, prostitutes, farmers and citizens ... read more