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This is Damiano Bivona’s autobiography. Written originally in Sicilian, and translated by his daughter-in-law, an absolutely extraordinary story ultimately unfolded. What wonders this poor, uneducated immigrant was able to accomplish in his sadly short life (he passed away in an accident when he was only fifty-one years old). The life story that this beloved grandfather lived was truly unique, and profoundly exceptional. A window into history of both Italy and America, in this book lives on the spirit of ambition, hard work and family ties.
Margaret Plant presents a wide-ranging cultural history of the city from the fall of the Republic in 1797, until 1997, showing how it has changed and adapted and how perceptions of it have shaped its reality.
In Italy, an elderly mother awaits a reunion with the son stolen from her by the Nazis—“A darkly hypnotic kaleidoscope of a book” (The Jewish Daily Forward). Haya Tedeschi sits alone in Gorizia, in northeastern Italy, surrounded by a basket of photographs and newspaper clippings. Now an old woman, she waits to be reunited after sixty-two years with her son, fathered by an SS officer and stolen from her by the German authorities as part of Himmler’s clandestine Lebensborn project. Tedeschi reflects on her Catholicized Jewish family’s experiences, in a narrative that deals unsparingly with the massacre of Italian Jews in the concentration camps of Trieste. Her obsessive search for her son leads her to photographs, maps, and fragments of verse, to testimonies from the Nuremberg trials and interviews with second-generation Jews, and to eyewitness accounts of atrocities that took place on her doorstep. From this broad collage of material and memory arises the staggering chronicle of Nazi occupation in northern Italy that “explores the 20th century’s darkest chapter in an original way . . . an exceptional reading experience” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune).
Ambivalence towards kings, and other sovereign powers, is deep-seated in medieval culture: sovereigns might provide justice, but were always potential tyrants, who usurped power and 'stole' through taxation. Rebel Barons writes the history of this ambivalence, which was especially acute in England, France, and Italy in the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, when the modern ideology of sovereignty, arguing for monopolies on justice and the legitimate use of violence, was developed. Sovereign powers asserted themselves militarily and economically provoking complex phenomena of resistance by aristocrats. This volume argues that the chansons de geste, the key genre for disseminating models of viole...
In Sacred Plunder, David Perry argues that plundered relics, and narratives about them, played a central role in shaping the memorial legacy of the Fourth Crusade and the development of Venice’s civic identity in the thirteenth century. After the Fourth Crusade ended in 1204, the disputes over the memory and meaning of the conquest began. Many crusaders faced accusations of impiety, sacrilege, violence, and theft. In their own defense, they produced hagiographical narratives about the movement of relics—a medieval genre called translatio—that restated their own versions of events and shaped the memory of the crusade. The recipients of relics commissioned these unique texts in order to exempt both the objects and the people involved with their theft from broader scrutiny or criticism. Perry further demonstrates how these narratives became a focal point for cultural transformation and an argument for the creation of the new Venetian empire as the city moved from an era of mercantile expansion to one of imperial conquest in the thirteenth century.
A uniquely broad, comprehensive and sophisticated analysis of an early modern fiscal system.
Based on Mamluk and Venetian sources, this book offers a thorough analysis of the various conflicts arising around Levant trade. It demonstrates how these conflicts more often than not cut across cultural divides in Late Medieval Mamluk Alexandria.