Drawing out her mother's childhood memories of life in southern Italy at the dawn of the twentieth century, Mary Melfi takes an unconventional approach to autobiographical writing. Italy Revisited serves as a double memoir, told in dialogue between a mother and a daughter. The conversation takes the reader to a medieval town high up in the mountains where time is told by the shadow the sun casts, where wheat and olive oil are the currency of choice (barter is in use), and where marriage is as much about property as it is about love. As they re-create that vanished world, the pair finds greater understanding of the tumultuous relationships that sometimes exist between immigrant mothers and their children.

Following Italy's unification in 1861, architects, artists, politicians, and literati engaged in volatile debates over the pursuit of national and regional identity. Growing industrialization and urbanization across the country contrasted with the rediscovery of traditionally built forms and objects created by the agrarian peasantry. Pride in Modesty argues that these ordinary, often anonymous, everyday things inspired and transformed Italian art and architecture from the 1920s through the 1970s. Through in-depth examinations of texts, drawings, and buildings, Michelangelo Sabatino finds that the folk traditions of the pre-industrial countryside have provided formal, practical, and poetic inspiration directly affecting both design and construction practices over a period of sixty years and a number of different political regimes. This surprising continuity allows Sabatino to reject the division of Italian history into sharply delimited periods such as Fascist Interwar and Democratic Postwar and to instead emphasize the long, continuous process that transformed pastoral and urban ideals into a new, modernist Italy.

444 illustrationer omfattende ornamenter, dragter, broderier, kniplinger, tekstiler, keramik, metal, træ, kurve m.m. fra Italien

Frame Work explores how framing devices in the art of Renaissance Italy respond, and appeal, to viewers in their social, religious, and political context.

Excerpt from Peasant Art in Italy Miscellaneous carving Drinking-flask from Sardinia 396 Goblet from Sardinia 395, 397 Supports, for Corsets from. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Pietro Pinti, born as he says 'in the Middle Ages,' worked the land with hoe and plow from his earliest youth. Growing up under Mussolini's Fascist regime on a farm near Florence, he and his family lived under conditions of extreme poverty, as sharecroppers to generally unscrupulous landowners. But during World War II, when millions in towns and cities suffered untold hardships, the hardy Tuscan peasants were well equipped to face the rigors of the era: war or no war, work on the land went on, and Pietro describes month by month a typical year in their lives: how they made wine and olive oil, planted and harvested the wheat by hand, made baskets and ladders from chestnut wood-skills now lost. With sly wit and salty wisdom, Pietro, a natural storyteller who played the trumpet, wrote poetry, and grew famous for his tales of peasants, knights, and brigands, recreates in colorful detail a world and peasant culture that is fast disappearing. Jenny Bawtree, an Englishwoman long settled in Tuscany, was so fascinated by Pietro's stories that she helped shape them into this autobiography, full of color and humor, hardship and nostalgia.