Italian Literature

A remarkable nineteenth-century account of Constantinople – which begins with a dazzling description of the city gradually appearing through the fog as the author’s ship approaches the harbour – Edmondo de Amicis’s narrative expertly combines...
By: Edmondo de Amicis

This is the first of three volumes collecting the complete plays of Luigi Pirandello, one of the foremost playwrights and fiction writers of the twentieth century, and the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934. Edited by actor and...
By: Luigi Pirandello

Dante’s best friend and a major exponent of the dolce stil novo , Guido Cavalcanti has had a lasting influence upon Italian poetry and is best known to English readers through the essays, translations and adaptations of Ezra Pound. Born from the...
By: Guido Cavalcanti

Dante’s dramatic journey through the circles of hell in search of redemption – and his encounter with devils, monsters and the souls of some of the greatest sinners who ever walked on earth – is one of the cornerstones of Western literature, the...
By: Dante Alighieri

After a passionate but ill-fated love affair with the beautiful married woman Clara, the young army officer Giorgio is transferred from Milan to Parma, where he meets the sickly and unattractive Fosca, the cousin of his commander. Although initially...
By: Igino Ugo Tarchetti

At the end of an industrious political career in conflict-riven Italy, the Florentine diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli composed his masterpiece The Prince , a classic study of power and politics, and a manual of ruthlessness for any ambitious ruler....
By: Niccolo Machiavelli

Cecco Angiolieri, the enfant terrible of Italian literature, loved women, gambling, food and wine. It is said that he found comfort for his bad luck at the dice and with Becchina, his unreciprocating lover, only by pouring venomous scorn upon his...
By: Cecco Angiolieri

Foscolo ranks among the most famous and enduringly popular poets in Italian literature, and in this collection, the only available in the English language, his most significant are collected in J.G. Nichols’s lucid verse translation. Expressing the...
By: Ugo Foscolo

Life of Dante brings together the earliest accounts of Dante available, putting the celebratory essay of literary genius Giovanni Boccaccio together with the historical analysis of leading humanist Leonardo Bruni. Their writings, along with the...
By: Giovanni Boccaccio