Brooding Italian Drago di Luca and reserved lawyer Alysa Dennis are brought together by a shocking, shared betrayal—their late partners had been having an affair! But against all the odds, they strike an unlikely friendship, and forbidden awareness simmers…. Alysa's calm facade hides a painful secret that haunts her every time she looks into the soulful eyes of Drago's motherless child. As the attraction builds between them, Christmas approaches with the promise of a new start. Can the healing miracle of love, and the joy of the season, make them a family?

The spiritual message contained in this book not only transcends organized religious groups, but is entirely blind to all national, political, racial, social, and economic boundaries.

As the economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s transformed Italy from a poor and largely rural nation into a prosperous, modern one, attitudes to love changed too. This book draws on unpublished personal testimonies of ordinary men and women, exploring their thoughts on courtship, marriage, honour, forced marriage, jealousy, and marriage breakdown.

“Zanily inventive . . . This deeply eccentric comedy belongs in the company of the best novels about wildly precocious kids” (The Seattle Times). Al Santamaria is a child prodigy, maybe a genius. It is not out of the realm of possibility that he, alone, will save the human race. But first, he has to solve a far more urgent problem: finding a home for his family. He exists, like many kids, in a realm located somewhere between reality and fantasy, enjoying time with imaginary friends and wielding his magical powers. He has a wonderful relationship with his father, Mario Elvis, and his mother, Agnese, and he’s convinced he has the best family in the world. But life isn’t all roses for the Santamaria family. They are typical of many Italian families today, whose existences seem suspended between conflicting impulses: on the one hand, delusions of grandeur and immoderate ambition, and on the other nostalgia for a past golden age and the secret wish that somebody, anybody, will come to their rescue. Big dreams, it appears, exist to be crushed. But Al is not about to give up. He lives in a marvelous world of his own. He has the energy, imagination, and unselfconscious talents of a child. And, although he doesn’t know it yet, he is going to remain a child his entire life. “An extended, guffaw-inducing, and sometimes tragic trip through Al’s young life. It reads like an Italian sitcom.” —Foreword Reviews “An amazing novel: it’ll move you and make you laugh.” —Elle “A plot shot through with the richness of Italian comedy and bright irony.” —La Repubblica

Thirty-year old husband, father and teacher Daniel Thomas is suffering an emotional crisis, one which threatens his happy marriage, the stability of his family, the sanity of his five-year old daughter, his livelihood and career, and the ultimately the salvation of his very soul. It is not a mid-life crisis, since he is too young to experience that type of calamity, but far worse, a crisis of faith. For years, Daniel has abandoned his faith in God or has God abandoned him? His crisis of faith reaches its zenith on Christmas Eve when his verbal tirades lead to another argument with his beloved wife, Mary, a devout Christian who refuses to allow her husbands doubts to destroy their marriage or their family. After a tragic accident early Christmas morning, Daniel becomes even more certain of the non-existence of God. His spiraling descent into despair results in the elimination of anything that involves God. This overwhelming bitterness drives a wedge that breaks apart the relationship with his mother-in-law, results in emotional and psychological problems with his daughter, Faith, who claims to be visited by a mysterious man, and an outburst in his school classroom that pits him against a powerful school board president that threatens his job. During all this turmoil in his life, Daniel encounters a series of incredible events that forces him to question all his doubts. His journey from tragedy to redemption, from disbelief to faith, and from emotional upheavals to peace and contentment is an inspiring story for anyone who has lost his faith. Where Are All The Miracles? resolves all the questions posed by all those Doubting Thomases that from time to time invade our mind, body and soul.

Miracles and Sacrilege is the story of the epochal conflict between censorship and freedom in film, recounted through an in-depth analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision striking down a government ban on Roberto Rossellini’s film The Miracle (1950). In this extraordinary case, the Court ultimately chose to abandon its own longstanding determination that film comprised a mere ‘business’ unworthy of free-speech rights, declaring for the first time that the First Amendment barred government from banning any film as ‘sacreligious.’ Using legal briefs, affidavits, and other court records, as well as letters, memoranda, and other archival materials to elucidate what was at issue in the case, William Bruce Johnson also analyzes the social, cultural, and religious elements that form the background of this complex and hard-fought controversy, focusing particularly on the fundamental role played by the Catholic Church in the history of film censorship. Tracing the development of the Church in the United States, Johnson discusses the reasons it found The Miracle sacrilegious and how it attained the power to persuade civil authorities to ban it. The Court’s decision was not only a milestone in the law of church-state relations, but it paved the way for a succession of later decisions which gradually established a firm legal basis for freedom of expression in the arts.

Until the beginning of the 18th century, to be 'Italian' meant to identify with a number of collective memories, rather than a national memory. Yet there are elements of continuity that have shaped Italian identity over the past 1,500 years. Religion, food, art and architecture, a literary language, as well as a particular relationship between cities and countryside, between family and civil society have all contributed to present day Italian culture and politics. Baldoli explores the history of Italy as a country, rather than as a nation, in order to trace its fascinating cultural and political development. Offering a way into each period of Italian history, the book brings Italy's past to life with extracts from poetry, novels and music. Drawing on the latest research published in English and Italian, this is the ideal introduction for all those interested in Italy's cultural and social past and its significance for the country's present.

Do you know Italian already and want to go a stage further? If you're planning a visit to Italy, need to brush up your Italian for work, or are simply doing a course, Colloquial Italian 2 is the ideal way to refresh your knowledge of the language and to extend your skills. Colloquial Italian 2 is designed to help those involved in self-study; structured to give you the opportunity to listen to and read lots of modern, everyday Italian, it has also been developed to work systematically on reinforcing and extending your grasp of Italian grammar and vocabulary. Key features of Colloquial Italian 2 include: * Revision material to help consolidate and build up your basics * A wided range of contemporary authentic documents, both written and audio * Lots of spoken and written exercises in each unit * Highlighted key structures and phrases, a Grammar reference and detailed answer keys * A broad range of situations, focusing on day to day life in Italy. Recorded by native speakers, the audio material will help you perfect your pronunciation and listening skills. For the eBook and MP3 pack, please find instructions on how to access the supplementary content for this title in the Prelims section.

In this book, Diana Bullen Presciutti explores how images of miracles performed by mendicant saints-reviving dead children, redeeming the unjustly convicted, mending broken marriages, quelling factional violence, exorcising the demonically possessed-actively shaped Renaissance Italians' perceptions of pressing social problems related to gender, sexuality, and honor. She argues that depictions of these miracles by artists-both famous (Donatello, Titian) and anonymous-played a critical role in defining and conceptualizing threats to family honor and social stability. Drawing from art history, history, religious studies, gender studies, and sociology, Presciutti's interdisciplinary study reveals how miracle scenes-whether painted, sculpted, or printed-operated as active agents of 'lived religion' and social negotiation in the spaces of the Renaissance Italian city.

The saints’ Lives in this book were written in Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Here translated into English and in full for the first time, they shed light on the ways in which both lay men and women sought God in the urban environment, and how they were understood and described by contemporaries. Only one of these saints (Homobonus of Cremona) was formally canonised by the Pope: the others were locally venerated within the communities which had nurtured them. Raimondo Palmario of Piacenza, contemporary with Homobonus, was remembered as both pilgrim and a vigorous exponent of practical charity. The nobleman Andrea Gallerani of Siena turned from a life of violence to good works, while another Sienese, the holy comb-seller Pier Pettinaio, exemplified the godly business man who insisted on the just price and on paying his taxes. Two very different women are included: Umiliana de’Cerchi of Florence, a widow with children, and the ‘servant-saint’ Zita of Lucca. The last of the Lives contains a bishop's account of how the cult of the humble Rigo was launched in Treviso in 1315. The book will welcomed by students and other readers interested in medieval Italian cities during this period of growth and vitality, and in how the religious life was lived in urban settings.