From grand views and romantic hillside villas to sprawling gardens and alfresco dinners, Italy offers its most authentic self through its landscape and its food. For the Love of Italy celebrates Italy's countryside and the farm-to-table movement with vivid profiles and luscious photography of twenty-two spectacular agriturismi, or hospitable farming estates. Each is inextricably connected to the Italian agricultural tradition and to the most simple of daily routines and pleasures. All will delight visitors with lovely accommodations and unforgettable graciousness. Marella Caracciolo, who has written extensively about travel in Italy from both sides of the Atlantic, and renowned photographer Oberto Gili present a sensual journey in this evocative collection of diverse landscapes, unmatched architecture, and local gastronomic traditions. One can stay at a Renaissance villa estate with breathtaking views, where biodynamic wine is produced, or at a unique luxury hotel in the prehistoric dwellings of Basilicata, where visitors sleep, bathe, and eat by candlelight. Families visiting Villa la Foce and the nearby thirteenth-century farmhouse in southern Tuscany, will discover exquisite gardens, a swimming pool, a tree house--and meals inspired by the bounty of the enormous vegetable garden and orchards. Caracciolo describes in transporting prose the colorful history and seasonal rhythms of these and nineteen other estates. And in Gili's photography the interiors, architecture, and gardens unfold with charm and grace. Whether one wants to learn traditional pasta making, sip Brunello right where it's made, or wander an ancient orangerie and then take a nap, these delightful farms promise unique and spectacular trips--or the fantasy of one. With a resource section that will be indispensable for anyone planning a trip to an agriturismo, For the Love of Italy is a portrait of an irresistible country and an enviable way of life.

Readers will delight in this tale of an urbanite who leaves her magazine job to move to Collelungo, Italy, population: 200. There, in the ancient city center of a historic Umbrian village, she sets up house with the enticing local gardener she met on vacation only weeks earlier. This impulsive decision launches an eye-opening series of misadventures when village life and romance turn out to be radically different from what she had imagined. Love lost with the gardener is found instead with Marcus, an abandoned English pointer that she rescues. With Marcus by her side, Justine discovers the bliss and hardship of living in the countryside: herding sheep, tending to wild horses, picking olives with her adopted Italian family, and trying her best to learn the regional dialect. The result is a rich, comic, and unconventional portrait about learning to live and love in the most unexpected ways.

What do you do when your greatest temptation is a dangerously handsome and alluring man? Elena works as an art restorer in Venice, and is in the process of bringing an old fresco to light in a historic palazzo. Art is her world, along with her best friend, Gaia, and Filippo, an old pal who she thinks just might be her new love . . . until Leonardo comes along. A chef with a tempestuous spirit, Leonardo is in Venice to launch a new restaurant, and he pushes all of Elena's buttons--good and bad. As Leonardo awakens Elena's senses, she faces the difficult yet exciting choice between the safety Filippo promises and the danger of Leonardo's embrace. I Watch You is part one of a bestselling erotic trilogy that proves Italians definitely do it better.

Putting the sex back in Pleasure, here is the first new English translation since the Victorian era of the great Italian masterpiece of sensuality and seduction Like Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Andrea Sperelli lives his life as a work of art, seeking beauty and flouting the rules of morality and social interaction along the way. In his aristocratic circles in Rome, he is a serial seducer. But there are two women who command his special regard: the beautiful young widow Elena, and the pure, virgin-like Maria. In Andrea’s pursuit of the exalted heights of extreme pleasure, he plays them against each other, spinning a sadistic web of lust and deceit. This new translation of D’Annunzio’s masterpiece, the first in more than one hundred years, restores what was considered too offensive to be included in the 1898 translation—some of the very scenes that are key to the novel’s status as a landmark of literary decadence. For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

A beautiful new edition of one of the most beloved cookbooks of all time, from “the Queen of Italian Cooking” (Chicago Tribune). A timeless collection of classic Italian recipes—from Basil Bruschetta to the only tomato sauce you’ll ever need (the secret ingredient: butter)—beautifully illustrated and featuring new forewords by Lidia Bastianich and Victor Hazan “If this were the only cookbook you owned, neither you nor those you cooked for would ever get bored.” —Nigella Lawson Marcella Hazan introduced Americans to a whole new world of Italian food. In this, her magnum opus, she gives us a manual for cooks of every level of expertise—from beginners to accomplished professionals. In these pages, home cooks will discover: • Minestrone alla Romagnola • Tortelli Stuffed with Parsley and Ricotta • Risotto with Clams • Squid and Potatoes, Genoa Style • Chicken Cacciatora • Ossobuco in Bianco • Meatballs and Tomatoes • Artichoke Torta • Crisp-Fried Zucchini blossoms • Sunchoke and Spinach Salad • Chestnuts Boiled in Red Wine, Romagna Style • Polenta Shortcake with Raisins, Dried Figs, and Pine Nuts • Zabaglione • And much more This is the go-to Italian cookbook for students, newlyweds, and master chefs, alike. Beautifully illustrated with line drawings throughout, Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking brings together nearly five hundred of the most delicious recipes from the Italian repertoire in one indispensable volume. As the generations of readers who have turned to it over the years know (and as their spattered and worn copies can attest), there is no more passionate and inspiring guide to the cuisine of Italy.

Art, poetry, and desire collide in a sensual, "elegantly moving" (The New Yorker) literary romance set in the cobbled streets and painted halls of Florence, Italy. Margot Harrington, an American volunteer in Florence, is an expert at book conservancy. While struggling to save a waterlogged convent library, she comes across a fabulous volume of sixteen erotic drawings by Giulio Romano, accompanying sixteen steamy sonnets by Pietro Aretino. When first published over four centuries ago, the Vatican ordered all copies destroyed. This one—now unique—volume has survived. The abbess prevails upon Margot to save the order’s finances by selling the magnificently illustrated erotica discreetly—meaning without the bishop’s knowledge. Margot’s other clandestine project is a middle-aged Italian who is boldly attempting radical measures to save endangered frescoes. She is 29 and available; he, older and married. He shares her sense of mission and soon her bed in this daring story of spiritual longing and earthly desire.

You don't have to live in Italy to live like an Italian. In this inviting collection of meals and memories, well-known food writer Sharon Sanders unites an Italian sensibility to an American lifestyle. She escorts us to the Italy that is in everyone's kitchen. Keenly aware of how sharing food enhances daily living, and in tune with the simplicity people crave today, she shares recipes for complete meals at a glance -- nearly 200 recipes in all -- made from seasonal produce, imported basics, and ingredients found in any supermarket.

How is it that American intellectuals, who had for 150 years worried about the deleterious effects of affluence, more recently began to emphasize pleasure, playfulness, and symbolic exchange as the essence of a vibrant consumer culture? The New York intellectuals of the 1930s rejected any serious or analytical discussion, let alone appreciation, of popular culture, which they viewed as morally questionable. Beginning in the 1950s, however, new perspectives emerged outside and within the United States that challenged this dominant thinking. Consuming Pleasures reveals how a group of writers shifted attention from condemnation to critical appreciation, critiqued cultural hierarchies and moralistic approaches, and explored the symbolic processes by which individuals and groups communicate. Historian Daniel Horowitz traces the emergence of these new perspectives through a series of intellectual biographies. With writers and readers from the United States at the center, the story begins in Western Europe in the early 1950s and ends in the early 1970s, when American intellectuals increasingly appreciated the rich inventiveness of popular culture. Drawing on sources both familiar and newly discovered, this transnational intellectual history plays familiar works off each other in fresh ways. Among those whose work is featured are Jürgen Habermas, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Walter Benjamin, C. L. R. James, David Riesman and Marshall McLuhan, Richard Hoggart, members of London's Independent Group, Stuart Hall, Paddy Whannel, Tom Wolfe, Herbert Gans, Susan Sontag, Reyner Banham, and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.