Five hundred years can confuse identity. An old chalk drawing of a girl, Maria, the daughter of a Chianti vintner leaves a Swiss art collector, Claude Beauvin entangled in a Renaissance love story from the past. The drawing is currently owned by a reclusive young widow, Andrea Garibaldi-Chase, who puts the drawing up for auction. With smoldering rumors that Leonardo da Vinci is the artist of the portrait, history is set on fire by a New York art dealer, an art history professor, and an intellectual property crimes investigator from INTERPOL who are all caught up in the drawings history. It's not until after the auction that Beauvin learns who the girl really was, what influence she had over da Vinci and the centuries since, and how his growing feelings for Andrea transcends time and identity.

The reader of this rollicking novel, first published in 1962, accompanies forty-seven-year-old Professor Arnold Soby (regarded by his girl students as safe and acceptable, but also good fun) on a sabbatical voyage to Italy and Greece. Among Soby's shipboard companions are Miss Winifred Throop, retired head mistress of the Winnetka Country Day School; her companion and colleague, Miss Mathilde Kollwitz, teacher of French and German; and Miss Thropp's seventeen-year-old niece, Cynthia Pomeroy, beautiful, scatterbrained, and studiously vulgar. Standing off the challenges of Italian and Swiss rivals, Soby pursues Cynthia through the waterways and plazas of Venice, the hills of Corfu, the ruins of Athens, and aboard the tiny, rolling, pitching tub Hephaistos in Greek waters. As is characteristic of Wright Morris's fiction, the real story develops beneath the surface of the brilliantly entertaining narrative.

The result of collaborative research from noteworthy dramatists and scholars, this volume investigates the dynamic relationship between culture, performance and theatre in Iran. The studies gathered here examine how various forms of performances, especially theatre, have and continue to undergo change in response to shifting political and social settings from the antiquity to the present day. The analysis in this book focuses on performance practices, examining drama, texts, rituals, plays, music, cinema and drama technologies. This is done in order to show how Iran has been imagined through enactments and representations, and reproduced through these performative actions. The book uses a wider definition of the concept of 'performance', offering analysis of a wide range of phenomena, including indigenous rituals – such as the naqqali and taziyeh – and online performances by diaspora communities.