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“During his picaresque, chameleon career, [Da Ponte] was always on the move. Jew and Catholic, priest and womaniser, poet and bankrupt, shopkeeper and university professor, he began his long life in and around Venice and ended it in New York. It is hard to imagine a more flamboyant personal history, a gift to the biographer Anthony Holden, who relishes his subject’s sheer exuberance.” — Lucasta Miller, The Guardian “Lorenzo da Ponte was, at various times, a Catholic priest, a gambler, a philanderer, an entrepreneur, a poet, a friend of Casanova, an enemy of the Venetian state, a teacher, a shopkeeper, a courtier and a troublemaker. The tangled yarn of his life would be worth spinni...
Sándor Agócs presents an intellectual and social history of the nascent Italian labor movement, exploring the conflicts between the conservative Catholic hierarchy and Catholic activists. In his book, Sándor Agócs explores the conflicts that accompanied the emergence of the Italian Catholic labor movement. He examines the ideologies that were at work and details the organizational forms they inspired. During the formative years of the Italian labor movement, Neo-Thomism became the official ideology of the church. Church leadership drew upon the central Thomistic principal of caritas, Christian love, in its response to the social climate in Italy, which had become increasingly charged wit...
This book shows how Dante Alighieri has been represented in the Italian collective imagination from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Often held to be a precursor of Italian unity, the author of the Divine Comedy has been put forward both as a standard-bearer of a secular, anti-clerical Italy and the embodiment of the concept of a deeply religious and Catholic nation; while he was later adopted by nationalist and fascists as well as a pop icon in the age of the internet and globalization. The book describes this long and fascinating history from a completely original point of view: the centuries-old myth of Dante is analysed from the perspective of cultural history. The sources employed include Dante commemorations, festivals and monuments, pilgrimages to his tomb, films and other media productions about Dante, as well as comic strips, advertisements and other cultural items dedicated to him.
Traces the intellectual life of Italy, where humanism began a century before it influenced the rest of Europe.
A wide-ranging look at the interplay of opera and political ideas through the centuries The Politics of Opera takes readers on a fascinating journey into the entwined development of opera and politics, from the Renaissance through the turn of the nineteenth century. What political backdrops have shaped opera? How has opera conveyed the political ideas of its times? Delving into European history and thought and music by such greats as Monteverdi, Lully, Rameau, and Mozart, Mitchell Cohen reveals how politics—through story lines, symbols, harmonies, and musical motifs—has played an operatic role both robust and sotto voce. This is an engrossing book that will interest all who love opera and are intrigued by politics.
Polzonetti reveals how revolutionary America inspired eighteenth-century European audiences, and how it can still inspire and entertain us.
Winner of the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Award in Economics from the Association of American Publishers Within a few months of assuming the position of curator of medieval coins at the American Numismatic Society in 1980, Alan M. Stahl was presented with a plastic bag containing a hoard of 5,000 recently discovered coins, most of which turned out to be from medieval Venice. The course of study of that hoard (and a later one containing more than 14,000 coins) led him to the Venetian archives, where he examined thousands of unpublished manuscripts. To provide an even more accurate account of how the Zecca mint operated in Venice in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries, Stahl commi...
Three of the greatest operas ever written—The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte—join the exquisite music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with the perfectly matched libretti of Lorenzo Da Ponte. Da Ponte’s own long life (1749–1838), however, was more fantastic than any opera plot. A poor Jew who became a Catholic priest; a priest who became a young gambler and rake; a teacher, poet, and librettist of genius who became a Pennsylvania greengrocer; an impoverished immigrant to America who became professor of Italian at Columbia University—wherever Da Ponte went, he arrived a penniless fugitive and made a new and eventful life. Sheila Hodges follows him from the last glittering years of the Venetian Republic to the Vienna of Mozart and Salieri, and from George III’s London to New York City.