A dream trip to Italy can only result in the best, most luxurious vacation with no unfortunate mistakes. Or maybe that’s too much to hope for... Gus can’t wait to get off the cramped flight from Canada to Italy and enjoy the bus tour across Naples, Rome, and other history- and wine-filled locations. Mitch, his eight-month-pregnant girlfriend, is less excited. And Thor? Well, being ten months old, it’s not at the top of his to-do list. Still, this is the trip of a lifetime—and it’s free! Except that after the somewhat disastrous flight, their decrepit old tour bus takes them four hours away from civilization to...Favola? Who’s ever heard of such a town? After the worst night of their lives in a hotel room that’s more like a jail cell, Gus and Mitch are taken in by an old-world Italian family whose highly religious matriarch is determined to get them married before they leave. Going home may be an issue, though, when their passports are accidentally thrown away. Now Gus must find a way to get his hands on fake ones before Mitch finds out the truth. Lost shoes, public nudity, and a police raid later, a mysterious stranger may be the answer to their troubles—or their biggest problem yet. That Time in Italy is an entertaining, humorous story of everything going wrong, how not to handle problems, and the growing pains of appreciating a strange new kind of life (even without extra-large coffees).

In the mid-1960s an unknown Italian film director named Sergio Leone was given $200,000 and some leftover film stock, and he went to make a Western. With an American TV actor named Clint Eastwood and a script based on a samurai epic, Leone wound up creating "A Fistful of Dollars", the first in a trilogy of films (with "For a Few Dollars More" and "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly") that was violent, cynical, and visually stunning. Along with his later masterpiece, "Once Upon a Time in the West", these films came to define the Spaghetti Western

This beautifully printed collection captures the timeless spirit of Italy with haunting images of its architecture, antique objects, and evocative landscapes. Linda Butler strayed from the standard tourist path to create these subtly toned black-and-white photographs, each one a quiet meditation on Italy's past. The richly textured images are reproduced in the large-format tradition, preserving their delicate gradations in tone. This cloth-bound volume includes a text by the photographer that describes her immersion in Italy's mesmerizing history.

The Other Side of the Tiber illuminates Italy in an entirely new way, treating the peninsula as a series of distinct places, subjects, histories, and geographies loosely bound together by shared priorities and limits. A subtle and solid image of Italy emerges as does a multi-faceted portrait of the author. Earthquakes and volcanoes; a hundred-year-old man; Siena as a walled city; Keats in Rome; the refugee camp of Manduria; the Slow Food movement realism in Caravaggio; the concept of good and evil; Mary the Madonna as a subject--from these varied angles, Wilde-Menozzi traces a society skeptical about competition and tolerant of contradiction, and suggests the benefits of its long view of time and belief in beauty.

'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.

Italy’s political disaster under a microscope There is little that hasn’t gone wrong for Italy in the last three decades. Economic growth has flatlined, infrastructure has crumbled, and out-of-work youth find their futures stuck on hold. These woes have been reflected in the country’s politics, from Silvio Berlusconi’s scandals to the rise of the far right. Many commentators blame Italy’s malaise on cultural ills—pointing to the corruption of public life or a supposedly endemic backwardness. In this reading, Italy has failed to converge with the neoliberal reforms mounted by other European countries, leaving it to trail behind the rest of the world. First They Took Rome offers a different perspective: Italy isn’t failing to keep up with its international peers but farther along the same path of decline they are following. In the 1980s, Italy boasted the West’s strongest Communist Party; today, social solidarity is collapsing, working people feel ever more atomized, and democratic institutions grow increasingly hollow. Studying the rise of forces like Matteo Salvini’s Lega, this book shows how the populist right drew on a deep well of social despair, ignored by the liberal centre. Italy’s recent history is a warning from the future—the story of a collapse of public life that risks spreading across the West.

"This lush guide, featuring more than 350 glorious photographs from National Geographic, showcases the best Italy has to offer from the perspective of two women who have spent their lives reveling in its unique joys."--Publisher's description.