Interpreting Italians is a socio-cultural travel guide designed for people whose interest in Italy goes beyond the readymade impression or the hackneyed cliché.

'Rich. . . eclectic. . . a feast' Telegraph This landmark collection brings together forty writers that reflect over a hundred years of Italy's vibrant and diverse short story tradition, from the birth of the modern nation to the end of the twentieth century. Poets, journalists, visual artists, musicians, editors, critics, teachers, scientists, politicians, translators: the writers that inhabit these pages represent a dynamic cross section of Italian society, their powerful voices resonating through regional landscapes, private passions and dramatic political events. This wide-ranging selection curated by Jhumpa Lahiri includes well known authors such as Italo Calvino, Elsa Morante and Luigi Pirandello alongside many captivating new discoveries. More than a third of the stories featured in this volume have been translated into English for the first time, several of them by Lahiri herself.

This edited collection offers a new approach to the study of Italy’s foreign policy from the 1960s to the end of the Cold War, highlighting its complex and sometimes ambiguous goals, due to the intricacies of its internal system and delicate position in the fault line of the East-West and North-South divides. According to received opinion, during the Cold War era Italy was more an object rather than a factor in active foreign policy, limiting itself to paying lip service to the Western alliance and the European integration process, without any pretension to exerting a substantial international influence. Eleven contributions by leading Italian historians reappraise Italy’s international role, addressing three complex and intertwined issues, namely, the country’s political-diplomatic dimension; the economic factors affecting Rome’s international stance; and Italy’s role in new approaches to the international system and the influence of political parties’ cultures in the nation’s foreign policy.

Taking the Noli me tangere and Doubting Thomas episodes as a focal point, this study examines how visual representations of two of the most compelling and related Christian stories engaged with changing devotional and cultural ideals in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. By reuniting their visual examples with important, often little-known textual sources, the authors reveal a complex relationship between visual imagery, the senses, contemporary attitudes toward gender, and the shaping of belief.

This volume – the first-ever collection of research on healthcare interpreting – centers on three interrelated themes: cross-cultural communication in healthcare settings, the interactional role of persons serving as interpreters and the discourse patterns of interpreter-mediated interaction. The individual chapters, by seven innovative researchers in the area of community-based interpreting, represent a pioneering attempt to look beyond stereotypical perceptions of interpreter-mediated interactions. First published as a Special Issue of Interpreting 7:2 (2005), this volume offers insights into the impact of the interpreter – whether s/he is a trained professional or a member of the patient's family – including ways in which s/he may either facilitate or impair reliable communication between patient and healthcare provider. The five articles cover a range of settings and specialties, from general medicine to pediatrics, psychiatry and speech therapy, using languages as diverse as Arabic, Dari, Farsi, Italian and Spanish in combination with Danish, Dutch, English and French.