Le scarpe, molto più che semplici protettori per i piedi, rappresentano un affascinante viaggio nella storia dell'umanità. Dalle prime pelli legate come protezione ai design innovativi e tecnologici di oggi, le scarpe sono sempre state presenti, plasmando la moda, esprimendo identità e riflettendo i cambiamenti sociali e culturali di ogni epoca. Scopri molto di più...

From evil vampires to a mysterious pack of wolves, new threats of danger and vengeance test Bella and Edward's romance in the second book of the irresistible Twilight saga. For Bella Swan, there is one thing more important than life itself: Edward Cullen. But being in love with a vampire is even more dangerous than Bella could ever have imagined. Edward has already rescued Bella from the clutches of one evil vampire, but now, as their daring relationship threatens all that is near and dear to them, they realize their troubles may be just beginning. Bella and Edward face a devastating separation, the mysterious appearance of dangerous wolves roaming the forest in Forks, a terrifying threat of revenge from a female vampire and a deliciously sinister encounter with Italy's reigning royal family of vampires, the Volturi. Passionate, riveting, and full of surprising twists and turns, this vampire love saga is well on its way to literary immortality. It's here! #1 bestselling author Stephenie Meyer makes a triumphant return to the world of Twilight with the highly anticipated companion, Midnight Sun: the iconic love story of Bella and Edward told from the vampire's point of view. "People do not want to just read Meyer's books; they want to climb inside them and live there." -- Time "A literary phenomenon." -- The New York Times

Two unaccompanied children travel across the Mediterranean in an overcrowded boat that has been designed to only make it halfway across… A 63-year-old man is woken one morning by border officers ‘acting on a tip-off’ and, despite having paid taxes for 28 years, is suddenly cast into the detention system with no obvious means of escape… An orphan whose entire life has been spent in slavery – first on a Ghanaian farm, then as a victim of trafficking – writes to the Home Office for help, only to be rewarded with a jail sentence and indefinite detention… These are not fictions. Nor are they testimonies from some distant, brutal past, but the frighteningly common experiences of Europe’s new underclass – its refugees. While those with ‘citizenship’ enjoy basic human rights (like the right not to be detained without charge for more than 14 days), people seeking asylum can be suspended for years in Kafka-esque uncertainty. Here, poets and novelists retell the stories of individuals who have direct experience of Britain’s policy of indefinite immigration detention. Presenting their accounts anonymously, as modern day counterparts to the pilgrims’ stories in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, this book offers rare, intimate glimpses into otherwise untold suffering.

Using original sources--such as newspaper articles, silent movies, letters, autobiographies, and interviews--Ilaria Serra depicts a large tapestry of images that accompanied mass Italian migration to the U.S. at the turn of the twentieth century. She chooses to translate the Italian concept of immaginario with the Latin imago that felicitously blends the double English translation of the word as "imagery" and "imaginary." Imago is a complex knot of collective representations of the immigrant subject, a mental production that finds concrete expression; impalpable, yet real. The "imagined immigrant" walks alongside the real one in flesh and rags.

This highly acclaimed survey of modern architecture and its origins has become a classic since it first appeared in 1980, and has helped to shape architectural practice and discourse worldwide. For this extensively revised and updated fifth edition, Kenneth Frampton has added a new section that explores in detail the modernist tradition in architecture across the globe in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He examines the varied ways in which architects are not only responding to the geographical, climatic, material and cultural contexts of their buildings, but also pursuing distinct lines of approach that emphasize topography, morphology, sustainability, materiality habitat and civic form. It remains an essential book for all students of architecture and architectural history.

A new translation of Bassani's moving novel of childhood friendship and the unexpected loss of innocence The years lived since then have not, in the end, been of any use: I haven't managed to remedy the suffering which has remained there like a hidden wound, secretly bleeding. In the fourth book of the Romanzo di Ferrara cycle, Bassani paints a moving portrait of a 1930s childhood in which even the familiar classroom and playground dramas begin to reflect the sinister forces at work in fascist Italy. This powerful tale of friendship and rivalry in the face of the ever encroaching spectre of adulthood adds yet another intricate thread to Bassani's rich tapestry of his native city, Ferrara. 'Giorgio Bassani is one of the great witnesses of this century, and one of its great artists' Guardian 'Powerful new translations . . . Bassani began as a poet, and McKendrick's redelivery of this taut uncompromising fiction reveals resonance and generosity' Ali Smith

Learn the language of la dolce vita! For anyone who wants to learn and enjoy the most expressive and romantic of languages, the third edition of The Complete Idiot’s Guide® to Learning Italian is the first choice for a whole new generation of enthusiastic students of Italian. This updated edition includes two new quick references on verbs, grammar, and sentence structure; two new appendixes on Italian synonyms and popular idiomatic phrases; and updated business and money sections. • First two editions have sold extraordinarily well • Italian is the fourth most popular language in the United States

The setting for his collection of eighteen stories by Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938) was the Adriatic seaport of Pescara and its hinterland in the Italian region of Abruzzo, the author depicting events and personalities from the time of his youth, but also drawing from bygone incidents that were yet memorable in the area's folk history. Pescara may not have had the cachet of celebrated cities such as Venice or Florence, but sympathetically and wryly revealed here by the pen of one of Italy's great writers it lives and breathes with a vitality probably best compared to that of James Joyce's 'dear dirty Dublin'. Indeed Joyce, who admired D'Annunzio, may well have been inspired by the Italian's cameos of small-town life, his parade of saints, voluptuaries and reprobates, their repressions, obsessions, individual dissolutions, collective explosions of anarchy, and their aptness for bizarre behavior that extended from the catatonic to the manic. D'Annunzio came to recognize just how exotic his native region was after he had left it for Rome, where he worked for some years as a journalist and essay writer in the employ of various literary magazines. His Abruzzo articles, and especially those in which he records examples of extraordinary devotional behavior (akin to what Mark Twain was witnessing at that time on the banks of the Ganges), became the basis of the stories in this collection. D'Annunzio was a published poet at the age of sixteen, and his verse has never been absent from the Western Canon since. Something of his painterly style, the layered brushwork of his descriptions, the gorgeous romantic renderings of rural scenes and the moods of the sea, his celebrations of sensuality, his aesthete's fascination with all the possible bodily conditions, from the virginal-voluptuous to the decayed and moribund (he has been hailed as 'the body's poet'), will amaze and delight the reader even in the blandest and most dictionary-dependent translation. The present one is no such, however. Vladislav Zhukov is an experienced translator who has rendered works from four languages into English, including a substantial book of poetry, three volumes of short stories, and a novel (all available on Amazon.com). His knowledge of Italian is that of someone who acquired the language while living in Italy during his youth.

An architect's defense of drawing as a way of thinking, even in an age of electronic media. Why would an architect reach for a pencil when drawing software and AutoCAD are a click away? Use a ruler when 3D-scanners and GPS devices are close at hand? In Why Architects Still Draw, Paolo Belardi offers an elegant and ardent defense of drawing by hand as a way of thinking. Belardi is no Luddite; he doesn't urge architects to give up digital devices for watercolors and a measuring tape. Rather, he makes a case for drawing as the interface between the idea and the work itself. A drawing, Belardi argues, holds within it the entire final design. It is the paradox of the acorn: a project emerges from a drawing—even from a sketch, rough and inchoate—just as an oak tree emerges from an acorn. Citing examples not just from architecture but also from literature, chemistry, music, archaeology, and art, Belardi shows how drawing is not a passive recording but a moment of invention pregnant with creative possibilities. Moving from the sketch to the survey, Belardi explores the meaning of measurement in a digital era. A survey of a site should go beyond width, height, and depth; it must include two more dimensions: history and culture. Belardi shows the sterility of techniques that value metric exactitude over cultural appropriateness, arguing for an “informed drawing” that takes into consideration more than meters or feet, stone or steel. Even in the age of electronic media, Belardi writes, drawing can maintain its role as a cornerstone of architecture.

The illegitimate son of a fortune teller, Ezio Comparoni (1920-52) never knew his father, rarely left his home town, and admitted no one to his home. His deliberate obscurity was compounded by his use of many pseudonyms, including Silvio d'Arzo, under which he wrote the remarkable novella and three stories collected in The House of Others. The novella The House of Others is among the rare perfect works of twentieth century fiction. In a desolate mountain village an old woman visits the parish priest, ostensibly to ask about dissolving a marriage. Gradually, as she probes for information on "special cases"--cases in which what is obviously wrong can also be irrefutably right--it becomes clear her true question is whether or not she might take her own life. The question is metaphysical, involving not only the woman's life but the priest's; and to it he has no answer.