Drawing from a lifetime of writing about Italy, William Murray takes us off the beaten path to give us more than landmarks, more than art history, more than four-star restaurants and two-dimensional landscapes. He explores an Italy rarely seen: the terrain of her soul and geography of her character. Book jacket.

THIS OMNIBUS EDITION INCLUDES THE ENTIRE ACCLAIMED TRILOGY BOOK 1: GOD'S TEETH Love, jealousy, murder, vendetta -- All in the time of cholera. Then the brigands attack! Carlo Como goes out fishing one dawn in 1882 on the wide river near his Italian village of Castrubello. But this morning Carlo hauls in a very different catch, one that will allow him to marry his love, Tonia. But Carlo's unlikely discovery unleashes a chain of fateful events that will define himself and his family for decades to come. Tonia's brother Ettore is determined to advance on his own merits and travels south to carve The King's Road through the mountains of Campania. Ettore soon finds himself fighting an impossible deadline and cut-throat brigands who swears to violently halt the brazen intruder threatening his mountain lair. BOOK 2: FATE'S RESTLESS FEET They expected a quick and glorious colonial conquest. A brutal fight to the finish in cactus labyrinth awaited. In 1911, brothers Gianni and Renzo Como land in Tripoli as Italy declares war on the Ottoman Empire. Renzo risks everything to protect his brother during a treacherous battle fraught with confusion, courage, and cruelty. Despite dire warnings, Angelina Scrivatti undertakes the perilous journey to America to claim a promise of marriage. She discovers the man she loves in the grip of alcoholic despair. They become swept up in a storm of ethnic violence one dark Christmas Eve--with a final chance for personal redemption. BOOK 3: DEATH TO THE WOLF Cruel winter descends on the Kingdom of Italy. The family, divided, faces extinction. Ettore Vacci celebrates his 80th birthday as Italy embraces its disastrous alliance with Nazi Germany. With the Italian 8th Army near Stalingrad, Donato Como's unit faces a massive Soviet offensive and killing temperatures in a battle for survival on Russia's frozen steppes. In Castrubello, Regina Vacci defies the Fascists' persecution of Jews. Ettore Vacci, shocked to see his nephew Pietro Como rise to power within Mussolini's regime, finds he must act, for justice, for Castrubello, for "onore". ✓

A fantastic and philosophical vision of the apocalypse by one of the most striking Italian novelists of the twentieth century. From his solitary buen retiro in the mountains, the last man on earth drives to the capital Chrysopolis to see if anyone else has survived the Vanishing. But there’s no one else, living or dead, in that city of “holy plutocracy,” with its fifty-six banks and as many churches. He’d left the metropolis to escape his fellow humans and their struggles and ambitions, but to find that the entire human race has evaporated in an instant is more than he had bargained for. Meanwhile, life itself—the rest of nature—is just beginning to flourish now that human beings are gone. Guido Morselli’s arresting postapocalyptic novel, written just before he died by suicide in 1973, depicts a man much like the author himself—lonely, brilliant, difficult—and a world much like our own, mesmerized by money, speed, and machines. Dissipatio H.G. is a precocious portrait of our Anthropocene world, and a philosophical last will and testament from a great Italian outsider.

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.

'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 book reconstructs the fate of Italian prisoners of war captured by the Red Army between August 1941 and the winter of 1942-43. On 230.000 Italians left on the Eastern front almost 100.000 did not come back home. Testimonies and memoirs from surviving veterans complement the author's intensive work in Russian and Italian archives. The study examines Italian war crimes against the Soviet civilian population and describes the particularly grim fate of the thousands of Italian military internees who after the 8 September 1943 Armistice had been sent to Germany and were subsequently captured by the Soviet army to be deported to the USSR. The book presents everyday life and death in the Soviet prisoner camps and explains the particularly high mortality among Italian prisoners. Giusti explores how well the system of prisoner labor, personally supervised by Stalin, was planned, starting in 1943. A special focus of the study is antifascist propaganda among prisoners and the infiltration of the Soviet security agencies in the camps. Stalin was keen to create a new cohort of supporters through the mass political reeducation of war prisoners, especially middle-class intellectuals and military élite. The book ends with the laborious diplomatic talks in 1946 and 1947 between USSR, Italy, and the Holy See for the repatriation of the surviving prisoners.