The return of a saint's body to its rightful resting place was an event of civic and spiritual significance retold in Medieval sources and substantiated by artistic commissions. Legends of Saint Thomas Apostle, for instance, claimed that the martyred saint had been miraculously transported from India to Italy during the thirteenth century. However, Saint Thomas's purported resting place in Ortona, Italy did not become a major stopping point on pilgrimage or exploration routes, nor did this event punctuate frescoed life cycles or become a subject for Renaissance altarpieces as one would expect. Instead, the site of the apostle's burial in Chennai, India has flourished as a terminus of religious pilgrimage, where a multifaceted visual tradition emerged, and where a vibrant local cult of 'Thomas Christians' remains to this day. An unlikely destination on the edge of the 'known' world thus became a surprising source of early modern Christian piety. By studying the art and texts associated with this little-known cult, this book disrupts assumptions about how knowledge of Asia took shape during the Renaissance and challenges art historical paradigms in which art was crafted by locals merely to be exported, collected, and consumed by curious European patrons. In so doing, Italy by Way of India proposes that we redefine the parameters of early modern visual culture to account for the ways that global mobility and the circulation of objects profoundly influence how cultures see and know each other as well as themselves.

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.

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.

India in the Italian Renaissance provides a systematic, chronological survey of early Italian representations of India and Indians from the late medieval period to the end of the 16th century, and their resonance within the cultural context of Renaissance Italy. The study focuses in particular on Italian attitudes towards the inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent and questions how Renaissance Italians, schooled in the admiration of classical antiquity, responded to the challenge of this contemporary pagan world. Meera Juncu draws from a wide-ranging selection of contemporary travel literature to trace the development of Italian ideas about Indians both before and after Vasco Da Gama’s landing in Calicut. After an introduction to the key concepts and a survey of inherited notions about India, the works of a diverse range of writers and editors, including Marco Polo, Petrarch and Giovanni Battista Ramusio, are analysed in detail. Through its discussion of these texts, this book examines whether ‘India’ came in any way to represent a pagan civilization comparable to the classical antiquity celebrated in Italy during the Renaissance. India in the Italian Renaissance offers a new and exciting perspective on this fascinating period for students and scholars of the Italian Renaissance and the history of India.

The decade from the 2008 global financial crisis to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic has seen a real transformation of the world order. The very nature of international relations and its rules are changing before our eyes. For India, this means optimal relationships with all the major powers to best advance its goals. It also requires a bolder and non-reciprocal approach to its neighbourhood. A global footprint is now in the making that leverages India's greater capability and relevance, as well as its unique diaspora. This era of global upheaval entails greater expectations from India, putting it on the path to becoming a leading power. In The India Way, S. Jaishankar, India's Minister of External Affairs, analyses these challenges and spells out possible policy responses. He places this thinking in the context of history and tradition, appropriate for a civilizational power that seeks to reclaim its place on the world stage.

“Two suitcases and the telephone numbers of two friends of friends: this was what I was carrying when I landed in India on October 22, 1998. What an irony in the fact that just a few years earlier, while boarding a plane from New Delhi to Rome, I had promised to myself not to go back to India, at least not until my retirement age.” But as fate would have it, Stefano Pelle eventually returns to post-liberalized India as an expatriate working for the Perfetti Van Melle Group and what starts from there is a journey through emerging markets. At the heart of Stefano’s psyche and his management beliefs are innumerable situations when a one-sided biased perspective would have led to failure in business deals or problems in personal life; more so being an Italian married to an Indian wife, currently settled in the Middle East and with responsibility over a geographical area extending from Bangladesh to Senegal. Overall, the story wrought here is one of hard work, ambition, and success.

When Portuguese explorers first arrived in India, the maritime passage initiated an exchange of goods as well as ideas. European ambassadors, missionaries, soldiers, and scholars who followed produced a body of knowledge that shaped European thought about India. Sanjay Subrahmanyam tracks these changing ideas over the entire early modern period.