A parent on the run. A juridical error. A man who has lost his memory, but who doesn't give up. His journey to find the truth. A truth that would have been better not to uncover. Sentenced to life in prison for a double homicide, he never confessed. He can't, he doesn't remember anything. Not only about that night, but about his past. After ten years, they let him go once the real killers are found. He finds out he is alone. Once back in his city, seeing again the places where he grew up, memories begin to resurface. Of his first thirteen years of life, when he was happy, he had a beautiful family and a father who adored him. After that, darkness. He doesn't understand why, but he tries to start over. From scratch. The encounter with an old friend of his father, makes him find out part of the truth. The father on the run. Him hiding in the car to follow him. A terrible accident that leaves him in an irreversible coma, according to doctors. But the thing he can't accept is that his father left him in the hospital, to his fate. He doesn't believe it, not for how much he remembers he loved him. He wants to find him, he has to! He needs to find out why he abandoned him. He thinks, hopes, that in those eighteen years of total darkness there is the answer. The search leads him to Germany, China, Africa. In the end... he realizes that not knowing the truth would have been better!

To mark the tercentenary of the birth of the eighteenth-century Venetian painter and draughtsman, Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, the National Gallery of Art in Washington has mounted an exhibition of his most outstanding drawings. Well over a hundred drawings and engravings have been brought together from collections around the world. Piazzetta has enjoyed a resurgence of interest among art historians in this century, but most studies have dwelt on his paintings. Professor Knox has provided a model for methods of dealing with Piazzetta problems: his stylistic development, his mannerisms, his working methods, commercial practices of the day and the dating of the drawings. Features that make the catalogue a truly valuable research tool include: the notes on Venetian money, the checklist of paintings and exhibitions discussed, and the essay on Piazzetta's drawings in the Hermitage for Albrizzi's Gerusalemme Liberata.

Giambattista Piazzetta, together with Giambattista Tiepolo, dominates history painting in eighteenth-century Venice. The greatest religious painter of his time, he was also widely known for his delightful small secular illustrations for printed books, when Venice was an important and influential center of book production. His drawings, especially the characteristic studies of heads of ordinary men and women, were popular with collectors and widely engraved, and became a familiar element on the walls of many a Venetian house. This is the first study in English of a very talented and much-loved painter, who was a key figure in the last great flowering of Venetian painting.

The subject is the human imagination—and the mysterious interplay between the imagination and the spaces it has made for itself to live in: gardens, rooms, buildings, streets, museums and maps, fictional topographies, and architectures. The book is a lesson in seeing and sensing the manifold forms created by the mind for its own pleasure. Like all of Robert Harbison's works, Eccentric Spaces is a hybrid, informed by the author's interests in art, architecture, fiction, poetry, landscape, geography, history, and philosophy. The subject is the human imagination—and the mysterious interplay between the imagination and the spaces it has made for itself to live in: gardens, rooms, buildings, streets, museums and maps, fictional topographies, and architectures. The book is a lesson in seeing and sensing the manifold forms created by the mind for its own pleasure. Palaces and haunted houses, Victorian parlors, Renaissance sculpture gardens, factories, hill-towns, ruins, cities, even novels and paintings constructed around such environments—these are the spaces over which the author broods. Brilliantly learned, deliberately remote in form from conventional scholarship, Eccentric Spaces is a magical book, an intellectual adventure, a celebration. Since its original publication in 1977, Eccentric Spaces has had a devoted readership. Now it is available to be discovered by a new generation of readers.