The author went to Venice in 1957, aged 25, to have fun for a season among the rich and glam. Written with 67 years' hindsight, this memoir is a vivid evocation of a vanished era.
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
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.
A marvellous biography of this clever, brilliant, opportunistic, amoral, inquisitive man - Damrosch's erudition serves his notorious subject very well.
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
MH constructs an enthralling narrative of Vatican intrigue by drawing on Cardinal Ippolito d'Este's records of the papal conclave of 1559. She shows how both the papacy and the political fat... read more
Patrick Leigh Fermor held that baroque architecture in Italy could never have existed without pasta in all its multitudinous and beguiling forms... Drawing on a decade and a half of living i... read more
A villa with a Roman aqueduct in the garden that famously belonged to Princess Zenaida Wolkonsky, whose salon included Gogol, Donizetti, Thorvaldsen, Stendhal and Sir Walter Scott. The autho... read more