The perpetual appeal of walled gardens, let alone Venetian ones - private, invisible to those outside, with a delicious water gate giving onto a canal, and exhaling drifts of orange blossom ... read more
Siena's medieval golden age was brought to a grisly end by an appalling visitation of the plague in 1348. Nevertheless, the republic of Siena lasted for four hundred years, from the C12th un... read more
The fragmented recollections of a handful of survivors of the earthquake that struck the northern Friuli in 1976. Their tiny village high in the Julian Alps, beneath the immense karstic mass... read more
Pieces together three generations of a family, moving between Italy and England, in an attempt to understand what roots and home might mean. Subtle, charming memoir.
When a young woman in Renaissance Italy is taken by her husband, the Duke of Ferrara, to a remote villa, she realises he intends to kill her... Richly told, by the author of Hamnet.
An English art historian is found dead in a Venetian bookshop after a bad flood. It's in the via dei Assassini, and her death and its consequences are anything but peaceful. Jolly dark stuff... read more
From the Alps to the Adriatic, through Ferrara, Mantova, Parma, Cremona, Pavia and Turin. Those who read Helena Attlee's recent Lev's Violin will know something of its historical use, but no... read more
Against the backdrop of WW2 and its aftermath, a young Italian woman marries and moves to her husband's village in the south. Ginzburg's characteristically limpid prose harbours may details ... read more
A rollocking historical novel set in Renaissance Venice: an artist sets his heart on a miraculous new pigment, only to find himself caught up in conspiracies, a love affair, violence, obsess... read more
Two men go walking in the Dolomites, but not together; one falls to his death, the other reports the body. Is it coincidence that they knew each other in earlier years, and that one had betr... read more
A marvellous biography of this clever, brilliant, opportunistic, amoral, inquisitive man - Damrosch's erudition serves his notorious subject very well.
Ludwig Pollak was the art dealer-scholar who found the missing arm of Laocoön, in the famous classical sculpture. In this mysterious, cerebral novella set in Rome in 1943, Pollak is exhorte... read more
Wildly delicious, deliciously straightforward - a celebration of good ingredients, sluiced with new olive oil and nipped with a pinch of salt...The beautiful farmhouse of Arniano - Amber's f... read more
An atmospheric, creepy thriller set in a remote valley in northern Italy, where a writer, investigating an apparent drowning many years before, is hampered by superstition.
Howard (1907-1987) served as an intelligence officer in WW2 throughout the Italian campaign. He married Lelia Caetani of Ninfa, where Bassani wrote a large part of The Garden of the Finzi Co... read more
A lavishly illustrated work of scholarship, exploring maiolica's conversations with artifacts ranging from Islamic metalwork and Chinese porcelain to Venetian lace and glass.
One of the great patrons of the Renaissance, creator of perhaps the most remarkable library outside the Vatican, the Duke of Urbino was also the most successful and feared mercenary of the a... read more