Iris Origo
Author: Caroline Moorehead
Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher
Published: 2004
Total Pages: 388
ISBN-13: 9781567922714
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A biography.
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A Chill in the Air
Author: Iris Origo
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: 2018-08-07
Total Pages: 193
ISBN-13: 1681372649
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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 In this previously unpublished and only recently discovered diary, Iris Origo, author of the classic War in Val d’Orcia, provides a vivid account of how Mussolini decided on a course of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 her godfather, William Phillips, was the American ambassador. Her diary describes the Fascist government’s growing infatuation with Nazi Germany as Hitler’s armies marched triumphantly across Europe and the campaign of propaganda and intimidation that was mounted in support of its new aims. The book ends with the birth of Origo’s daughter and Origo’s decision to go to Rome to work with prisoners of war at the Italian Red Cross. Together with War in Val d’Orcia, A Chill in the Air offers an indispensable record of Italy at war as well as a thrilling story of a formidable woman’s transformation from observer to actor at a great historical turning point.
Images and Shadows
Author: Iris Origo
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: 2019-10-15
Total Pages: 393
ISBN-13: 1681373653
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →An extraordinary memoir by Iris Origo, who chronicled political life in A Chill in the Air and War in Val d'Orcia, and now turns inward to describe her own family, the work of writing, and the transcience of memory. Images and Shadows, Iris Origo’s autobiographical account of her early life, is as perceptive and humane and beautifully written as her celebrated memoir War in Val d’Orcia. Origo’s father came from an old and moneyed American family, her mother was the daughter of an Irish peer, and Iris grew up in the most privileged of circumstances. Her father died of tuberculosis when he was only thirty, and her mother moved to Fiesole, Italy, where she and Iris developed a close friendship with the great connoisseur and art historian Bernard Berenson. Later, Origo and her Italian husband transformed a desolate and deforested Tuscan property into a flourishing estate, and it was there that she discovered her true calling as a writer. In Images and Shadows, Origo paints portraits of her shy, loving father and her headstrong mother, and describes beloved places, the books that formed her sensibility, and how she grew up and made her way in the world. She reflects on the pleasures and challenges of writing and evokes the persistence and fragility of memory. Images and Shadows is an autobiography that is as thoughtful as it is profoundly touching.
A Thousand Days in Tuscany
Author: Marlena de Blasi
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2005-09-27
Total Pages: 370
ISBN-13: 0345481097
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →They had met and married on perilously short acquaintance, she an American chef and food writer, he a Venetian banker. Now they were taking another audacious leap, unstitching their ties with exquisite Venice to live in a roughly renovated stable in Tuscany. Once again, it was love at first sight. Love for the timeless countryside and the ancient village of San Casciano dei Bagni, for the local vintage and the magnificent cooking, for the Tuscan sky and the friendly church bells. Love especially for old Barlozzo, the village mago, who escorts the newcomers to Tuscany’s seasonal festivals; gives them roasted country bread drizzled with just-pressed olive oil; invites them to gather chestnuts, harvest grapes, hunt truffles; and teaches them to caress the simple pleasures of each precious day. It’s Barlozzo who guides them across the minefields of village history and into the warm and fiercely beating heart of love itself. A Thousand Days in Tuscany is set in one of the most beautiful places on earth–and tucked into its fragrant corners are luscious recipes (including one for the only true bruschetta) directly from the author’s private collection.
War in Val d'Orcia
Author: Iris Origo
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: 2018-08-07
Total Pages: 321
ISBN-13: 1681372665
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A bestseller upon its original publication in the 1980s, these diaries reveal life during WWII in Tuscany and include stunning rediscovered photographs In the Second World War, Italy was torn apart by German armies, civil war, and the Allied invasion. In a corner of Tuscany, one woman—born in England, married to an Italian—kept a record of daily life in a country at war. Iris Origo’s powerful diary, War in Val d’Orcia, is the spare and vivid account of what happened when a peaceful farming valley became a battleground. At great personal risk, the Origos gave food and shelter to partisans, deserters, and refugees. They took in evacuees, and as the front drew closer they faced the knowledge that the lives of thirty-two small children depended on them. Origo writes with sensitivity and generosity, and a story emerges of human acts of heroism and compassion, and the devastation that war can bring.
A Soldier on the Southern Front
Author: Emilio Lussu
Publisher: Rizzoli Publications
Published: 2014-02-25
Total Pages: 277
ISBN-13: 0847842797
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A rediscovered World War I masterpiece—one of the few memoirs about the Italian front—for fans of military history and All Quiet on the Western Front An infantryman’s “harrowing, moving, [and] occasionally comic” account of trench warfare on the alpine front seen in A Farewell to Arms (Times Literary Supplement). Taking its place alongside works by Ernst JŸnger, Robert Graves, and Erich Maria Remarque, Emilio Lussu’s memoir as an infantryman is one of the most affecting accounts to come out of the First World War. A classic in Italy but virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, it reveals in spare and detached prose the almost farcical side of the war as seen by a Sardinian officer fighting the Austrian army on the Asiago plateau in northeastern Italy—the alpine front so poignantly evoked by Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms. For Lussu, June 1916 to July 1917 was a year of continuous assaults on impregnable trenches, absurd missions concocted by commanders full of patriotic rhetoric and vanity but lacking in tactical skill, and episodes often tragic and sometimes grotesque, where the incompetence of his own side was as dangerous as the attacks waged by the enemy. A rare firsthand account of the Italian front, Lussu’s memoir succeeds in staging a fierce indictment of the futility of war in a dry, often ironic style that sets his tale wholly apart from the Western Front of Remarque and adds an astonishingly modern voice to the literature of the Great War.
An Italian Education
Author: Tim Parks
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2015-01-07
Total Pages: 297
ISBN-13: 0802191142
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A “marvelous” Mediterranean memoir of an expatriate father raising his children in Italy—from the author of Italian Neighbors (The Washington Post). Tim Parks offers another lively firsthand account of Italian society and culture—this time focusing on all the little things that turn an ordinary newborn infant into a true Italian. When British-born Tim Parks heard a mother at the beach in Pescara shout to her son, “Alberto, don’t sweat! No you can’t go in the sea till eleven, it’s still too cold, go and see your cousin in row three number fifty-two,” he was inspired to write about parenting in Italy—which he was doing himself at the time after adopting the country as his own. In this humorous memoir, Parks offers an enchanting portrait of Italian childhood that shifts from comedy to despair in the time it takes to sing a lullaby. The result is “a wry, thoughtful, and often hilarious book . . . a parable of how our children, no matter what, are other than ourselves” (The New Yorker). “Glimpses of Italy that are fond, critical, pithy and penetrating.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A Need to Testify
Author: Iris Origo
Publisher: Helen Marx Books
Published: 2002
Total Pages: 414
ISBN-13: 9781885586513
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Introduction by Ted Morgan When originally released in the early 1980s, New Statesman called Origo's final book 'a sensitive and beautifully written book by a remarkable writer.' Available again in this new edition, Origo's memoir tells the story of four friends, writer Lauro de Bosis, American monologuist Ruth Draper, the historian Gaetano Salvemi, and author of 'Fontamara' and 'Bread and Wine', Ignazio Silone, each of whom made various life sacrifices in the fight for a non-fascist Italy. Illustrated throughout with photos.
Dark Water
Author: Robert Clark
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 2008-10-07
Total Pages: 370
ISBN-13: 0385528345
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Birthplace of Michelangelo and home to untold masterpieces, Florence is a city for art lovers. But on November 4, 1966, the rising waters of the Arno threatened to erase over seven centuries of history and human achievement. Now Robert Clark explores the Italian city’s greatest flood and its aftermath through the voices of its witnesses. Two American artists wade through the devastated beauty; a photographer stows away on an army helicopter to witness the tragedy first-hand; a British “mud angel” spends a month scraping mold from the world’s masterpieces; and, through it all, an author asks why art matters so very much to us, even in the face of overwhelming disaster.
When Jesuits Were Giants
Author: Cornelius M. Buckley
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 1999
Total Pages: 410
ISBN-13: 9780898707038
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →No one in France or the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century doubted that the Jesuits, loved and honored by friends, hated and feared by enemies, were a force to be reckoned with. Scholars, missionaries, educators, adventurers, social innovators - they were Renaissance men, giants. This is a biography that chronicles the life and times of just such a man, Louis-Marie Ruellan, who began his life as a romantic, pampered, bourgeois Breton who ended up a selfless servant of God. Ruellan had entered the Jesuits in 1870, just in time to serve with them in the Franco-Prussian War. After the war, he was exiled with them to England in 1880, and finally came to the United States in 1883 to work among the Salish Indians of the Pacific Northwest. Among other things, Ruellan ended up as a founder of Gonzaga University. Through Ruellan's extensive correspondence, much of which is contained in the book, the author introduces the reader to miners lured to the Northwest by gold, as well as to the Indians, homesteaders, railroad laborers, farmers, and the men and women who gave the American frontier such a magical aura.
