Italian Literature

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

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

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

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

In the summer of 1348, the plague ravages Florence, and ten young Florentines take refuge in the countryside, where they entertain themselves with tales of love, death and corruption, featuring a host of colourful characters from lascivious...
By: Giovanni Boccaccio

This collection of Dante Alighieri’s Canzoniere, translated for the first time in its entirety into English, charts his poetic evolution and displays the ground on which his Vita Nova and Divine Comedy developed. Inspired in his early poems by...
By: Dante Alighieri

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

Published for the first time in 1831, and here presented in a dual-language edition with some of his lesser-known unpublished poems, Leopardi's poetical masterpiece is an unsurpassed anatomy of man's unhappiness on earth. Trapped between an...
By: Giacomo Leopardi