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La Foce
Situated in the Val d'Orcia, a wide valley in southeastern Tuscany, La Foce is run by Benedetta and Donata Origo, and is open to the public one day a week.".
Iris Origo
Iris Origo was one of the twentieth century's most attractive and intriguing women, a brilliantly perceptive historian and biographer whose works remain widely admired. Iris grew up in Italy where she became part of the colourful and privileged Anglo-Florentine set that included Edith Wharton, Harold Acton and the Berensons. When Iris married Antonio Origo, they bought and revived La Foce, a derelict stretch of the beautiful Val d'Orcia valley in Tuscany and created an estate that thrives to this day. During World War II they sided firmly with the Allies, taking considerable risks in protecting children and sheltering partisans and Iris's diary from that time, War in Val d'Orcia, is now considered a modern classic. Caroline Moorehead has drawn on many previously unpublished letters, diaries, and papers to write the definitive biography of a very remarkable woman.
La Foce
Discover La Foce, the Renaissance villa and classically inspired twentieth-century garden, at the dawn of its hundredth anniversary—once a barren Tuscan estate brought to life through the extraordinary vision and determination of Iris and Antonio Origo. In 1924, English-born biographer and writer Iris Origo (1902–1988) and her husband, Antonio, purchased La Foce, a sprawling estate centered around a half-ruined fifteenth-century villa with a dream that was as ambitious as it was audacious. Guided by a deep-seated desire to make a difference, the Origos dedicated their lives to transforming an impoverished terrain into a thriving landscape of wheat fields, olive groves, and vineyards. Wit...
A Chill in the Air
A harrowing account of life in Italy in the year leading up to World War II, available in the US for the first time. In 1939 it was not a foregone conclusion that Mussolini would enter World War II on the side of Hitler. In this previously unpublished and only recently discovered diary, Iris Origo, author of the classic War in Val d’Orcia, provides a vivid account of how Mussolini decided on a course of action that would devastate his country and ultimately destroy his regime. Though the British-born Origo lived with her Italian husband on an estate in a remote part of Tuscany, she was supremely well-connected and regularly in touch with intellectual and diplomatic circles in Rome, where h...
The Shaping of Tuscany
This book shows how the seemingly immutable Tuscan landscape was largely shaped by modern conflicts over economic resources and cultural meanings.
Their Other Side
“Our lives are Swiss,” Emily Dickinson wrote in 1859, “So still—so cool.” But over the Alps, “Italy stands the other side.” For Dickinson, as for many other writers and artists, Italy has been the land of light, a seductive source of invention, enchantment, and freedom. So it was for Helen Barolini, who, as a student in Rome after World War II, wrote her first poetry and gave birth to her own creative life, reinvigorating her mother tongue. In this book, Barolini celebrates the lives of other women whose imaginations succumbed to the lure of Italy. Here Barolini profiles six gifted women transformed by Italy’s mythic appeal. Unlike Barolini herself, they were not daughters of...
Hidden Histories
Tuscany is a landscape whose cultural construction is complicated and multi-layered. It is this very complexity that this book seeks to untangle. By revealing hidden histories, we learn how food, landscape and architecture are intertwined, as well as the extent to which Italian design and contemporary consumption patterns form a legacy that draws upon the Romantic longings of a century before. In the process, this book reveals the extent to which Tuscany has been constructed by Anglos — and what has been distorted, idealized and even overlooked in the process.
The Merchant of Prato
This extraordinary re-creation of the life of a medieval Italian merchant, Francesco di Marco Datini, is one of the greatest historical portraits written in the twentieth century. Drawing on an astonishing cache of letters unearthed centuries after Datini's death, it reveals to us a shrewd, enterprising, anxious man, as he makes deals, furnishes his sumptuous house, buys silks for his outspoken young wife and broods on his legacy. It is an unequalled source of knowledge about the texture of daily life in the small, earthy, violent, striving world of fourteenth-century Tuscany. 'Datini has now probably become most intimately accessible figure of the later Middle Ages ... brilliant and intricate' The Times 'As a picture of Tuscany before the dawn of the Renaissance it is a complement to The Decameron' Sunday Times
The World in Books
A delightful, inspiring, and idea-rich selection of fifty-two of the best, most important short nonfiction works of all time—from Plato to Michael Pollan and Dante to Joan Didion—chosen by historian, lifelong reader, and bestselling author of Don’t Know Much About History. From ancient times to the present day, The World in Books offers a wide-ranging historical education through pleasure reading—and a fantastic introduction to some of the most thought-provoking, profound, and interesting nonfiction works of all time. From Sun Tzu’s The Art of War to bell hooks’s All About Love, as well as such recent classics as Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists, Davis’s guide suggests a world of nonfiction books and explains just why they’re so historically meaningful and culturally relevant today. The perfect guide for the modern-day reader, these fifty-two selections provide an ideal way to explore some of the most enduring, influential books ever published, introducing us anew to world-shaping historical figures, events, and ideas.
Images and Shadows
The lucidly written memoir of Iris Origo, the writer of the bestselling War in Val d'Orcia It has only been through my affections that I have been able to perceive, however imperfectly, some faint "intimations of immortality" Images and Shadows is the story of those affections: for a loving, shy father, who died when his daughter was very young; for a vital, headstrong mother; for friends and family, alive and dead. And for the places Origo lived: Ireland, America, England; the childhood home in the hills above Florence; and her own beloved La Foce - the desolate, deforested estate which she and her Italian husband bought, and into which they poured the energy and patience of their best year...
