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'Hooper has written a fascinating, affectionate and well-researched study that delivers the tantalising flavour of a country as hot, cold, bitter and sweet as an affogato' The Telegraph 'This portrait of a nation is required reading for anyone heading to a Tuscan villa or Puglian beach this summer' Financial Times Sublime and maddening, fascinating yet baffling, Italy is a country of endless paradox and seemingly unanswerable riddles. John Hooper's marvellously entertaining and perceptive book is the ideal companion for anyone seeking to understand contemporary Italy and the unique character of the Italians. Looking at the facts that lie behind - and often belie - the stereotypes, his revealing book sheds new light on many aspects of Italian life: football and Freemasonry, sex, symbolism and the reason why Italian has twelve words for a coat hanger, yet none for a hangover.
Italy is a country synonymous with style and beauty in all aspects of life: the rich history of Rome, Renaissance art of Florence, graceful canals of Venice, high fashion of Milan, signature pasta alla bolognese of Bologna, colorful architecture of Portofino and winking blue waters of Capri and the Amalfi Coast, among many others. Italians themselves live effortlessly amid all this splendor, knowing instinctively just the type of outfit to throw on, design element to balance, or delectable ingredient to add.
A guide to understanding the Italians which reveals their cultural curiosities and defining characteristics.
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This book is a novel and original collection of essays on Italians and food. Food culture is central both to the way Italians perceive their national identity and to the consolidation of Italianicity in global context. More broadly, being so heavily symbolically charged, Italian foodways are an excellent vantage point from which to explore consumption and identity in the context of the commodity chain, and the global/local dialectic. The contributions from distinguished experts cover a range of topics including food and consumer practices in Italy, cultural intermediators and foodstuff narratives, traditions of production and regional variation in Italian foodways, and representation of Italianicity through food in old and new media. Although rooted in sociology, Italians and Food draws on literature from history, anthropology, semiotics and media studies, and will be of great interest to students and scholars of food studies, consumer culture, cultural sociology, and contemporary Italian studies.
The Italian diaspora throughout the world navigate and negotiate various complex and multidirectional language dynamics. In order to account for the sociolinguistic processes that have taken place, this book provides a detailed observation of these linguistic dynamics from the point of view of the Italian diaspora in Bedford, in the UK. This study on the language behaviour of three generations of Italian residents in Bedford provides empirical data on, and highlights the importance of, the sociolinguistic examination of English in service encounters. What comes to light in most of the cases analysed, is that audience design has a proven influence on the choice of language and repertoire with...
Italian Americans share rich stories of everyday life.
Outside of Italy, the country’s culture and its food appear to be essentially synonymous. And indeed, as The Italian Way makes clear, preparing, cooking, and eating food play a central role in the daily activities of Italians from all walks of life. In this beautifully illustrated book, Douglas Harper and Patrizia Faccioli present a fascinating and colorful look at the Italian table. The Italian Way focuses on two dozen families in the city of Bologna, elegantly weaving together Harper’s outsider perspective with Faccioli’s intimate knowledge of the local customs. The authors interview and observe these families as they go shopping for ingredients, cook together, and argue over who has to wash the dishes. Throughout, the authors elucidate the guiding principle of the Italian table—a delicate balance between the structure of tradition and the joy of improvisation. With its bite-sized history of food in Italy, including the five-hundred-year-old story of the country’s cookbooks, and Harper’s mouth-watering photographs, The Italian Way is a rich repast—insightful, informative, and inviting.
This book evokes the life of the Italian community in south Wales from the end of the 19th century to the end of World War II, when the Italian café was central to the social life of many small communities in the industrialized valleys. It follows the fortunes of Italian families like the Bracchis, the Bernis, the Contis, and the Sidolis and explores their influence on Welsh society. Hughes explains why so many Italian immigrants from the Bardi region came to settle in south Wales. The rise of Italian temperance bars in nonconformist Wales and the economic and social factors that lie behind the rise and fall of the Italian café are discussed. Also included is information on the treatment of Italian internees during the war and the tragic case of the Andorra Star, the ship carrying many of them to Canada that was torpedoed by a U-boat. Included are archive photographs that produce a revealing and accessible history of the recent past. This replaces 1854110837.
This book proposes a significant new interpretation of the relations between Italian partisans and British forces during the Italian campaign of 1943-1945. The core of the argument challenges many assumptions that are today still present both in Italian and in the Anglophone historiography on the subject. In current historiography, the debate is still ongoing as to whether the British were a hostile force to the Italian Resistance, trying to weaken it to better control it, or a genuine and committed ally. Instead of a clear-cut and artificial dichotomy between the 'Italians' and the 'British' this book posits the idea that lines were often blurred, and relations existed on a scale that inclu...