Top 10 Italian Literature and Stories About Italy

 Suggested Summer Reading List

Adapted from Michael San Filippo,
(http://italian.about.com)

There are a number of Italian texts, both classic and contemporary, that are must-reads for anyone interested in the history, culture, and language of Italy . Whether it's a trip to hell and back, a year's worth of love poems, or ribald, coarse humor during the plague, there's a tale for everyone.

1) A Place to Live (optional)                                                                                      

A wide-ranging collection from one of the foremost Italian writers of the 20th century. With an unerring eye and unparalleled eloquence, Natalia Ginzburg observes everything around her, sparing no one, least of all herself. In these essays Ginzburg writes honestly and insightfully about being a writer and mother, being displaced during World War II, and experiencing deprivation in postwar Italy .

2) Canzoniere (optional)

Petrarchan and Shakespearen Sonnets will be compared and contrasted in class.
Francesco Petrarca, one of the great early Renaissance humanists, wrote love poetry in the vulgar tongue. His Canzoniere had enormous influence on the poets of the 15th and 16th centuries. Head-over-heels in love with Laura, Petrarca wrote 365 sonnets, one passionate poem a day dedicated to his true love.

3) Decamerone   Part II

Written by the Italian humanist writer Giovanni Boccaccio almost 650 years ago, Il Decamerone contains a hundred tales supposedly told in ten days by a party of ten young people who had fled from the Black Death in Florence . Regarded as his masterpiece and a model for Italian classical prose, its influence on Renaissance literature was enormous.

4) Divine Comedy 

The poem by Dante, begun in exile in 1306 and allegorically describing the poet's (by implication mankind's) journey through life to salvation. The Commedia is the central and culminating literary work of medieval Europe . It is systematically structured in terza rima, with three cantiche (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso).

5) Il Gattopardo (optional)

A classic of modern fiction. Set in the 1860s, The Leopard is the spellbinding story of a decadent, dying Sicilian aristocracy threatened by the approaching forces of democracy and revolution. Giuseppe di Lampedusa, also an astronomer and a Sicilian prince, was 58 when he started to write The Leopard, though he had had it in his mind for 25 years.

6) Il Principe or The Prince

The definitive manual of modern politics written by the Italian Renaissance political philosopher Nicolò Machiavelli almost 500 years ago.

7) I Promessi Sposi

Alessandro Manzoni's powerfully characterized historical reconstruction of plague-ravaged 17th-century Lombardy . The simple attempts of two poor silkweavers to marry is used to explore the corrupt and oppressive rule of the Spaniards and, by implication, of the later Austrians. The novel also forged from Tuscan the literary Italian which, after the unification of Italy , became standard Italian.

8) Orlando Furioso

A romance epic by the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto. Orlando goes mad because his lady, Angelica, marries a Moorish youth, but he is cured in time to defeat Agramante, king of Africa , who has been besieging Paris . Ariosto invents fantastic episodes and complicated romantic intrigues and adventures.

9) Sei Personaggi in Cerca d'Autore (optional)

Play in three acts by Luigi Pirandello, produced and published in Italian in 1921. Introducing Pirandello's device of the "theater within the theater," the play explores various levels of illusion and reality. It had a great impact on later playwrights, particularly such practitioners of the Theater of the Absurd as Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Jean Genet.

10) The Wine-Dark Sea (optional)

A collection of thirteen stories written by Leonardo Sciascia between 1959 and 1972, they offer a kind of capsule history of Sicily, ranging through several hundred years and engaging the country's events from their exhilarating and terrible underside.

11) The Adventures of Pinocchio

Audio Book    

Other suggested Modern Italian Literature in ebook form (pick two)

literary translations by Ercole Guidi for all those in love with the language of Dante.http://ercoleguidi.altervista.org/the.htm

Andrea DeCarlo (1989)
Two of Two
Two friends, two choices, two stories in DeCarlo's great, best-selling novel.

Dacia Maraini (1990)
The Long Life of Marianna Ucrìa
Marianna, immured in her mysterious and disturbing silence, lives, loves, and suffers in 17th century Sicily.

Carlo Emilio Gadda (1946)
That Awful Mess on Via Merulana
From this masterpiece by the father of Italy's Neo-avanguardia, The Palace of Gold.

Aldo Busi (2001)
Letter Written fron Another Son to Another Dad
A perfect son writes the dream-dad we've all wished to have. From: Manual of the Perfect Dad.

Niccolò Ammaniti (1996)
The Zoologist
From the collection Mud, published by Mondadori, an hilarious short story by Italy's most successful novelist of his generation.

Umberto Eco (2001)
Holy Wars, Passion and Reason
Random thoughts upon the superiority of cultures.

Beppe Severgnini (2001)
The Snooper
An alien in Milan's fashion world. One: the Rizzoli man.

Alda Merini (2002)
Poems
Among the highest voices of Italy's contemporary poetry. Accademia di Francia's 2002 Nobel Prize for Literature nominee.

Carmen Covito (2002)
The Red and the Dark
Archeology, adventure, comedy, in one of Italy's most brilliant writers' latest novel.

Carmen Covito (2001)
Tales form the Web
Seven short stories by this famous Italian novelist, now collected into Italy's first self-published e-book.

Luciano De Crescenzo (2001)
The Doppelgänger
"Just stop thinking and you'll hear the ticking away of time."

Vincenzo Cerami (2001)
Forgotten Lips
There she was, at last, popping out from behind the newsstand at Piazza Trilussa. She had dropped out of sight for a half hour now. Carlo heaved a good sigh and was back on her tail....

Mario Biondi (1999)
Code Shadow
An obscure power controls all that we write, say, think? Find out in Mario Biondi's breathtaking thriller.

Mario Biondi (1985)
The Eyes of a Woman
Premio Campiello 1985 (Italy's top literary award). A great Italian Family Saga unfolding with the event that have come to connote the century behind us.

Ercole Guidi (1997)
The Long Journey of the Western Mind
From classical to post-modern, a chronological journey through the masters and the events that have shaped the Western Mind.

 

Italian Themes by American/British Writers

William Shakespeare

 

Suggested Reading by Rick Steves (Fiction)

Irving Stone

E.M. Foster

Dan Brown

Elizabeth Spencer

Sarah Dunant

Mark Helprin

Robert Harris

Robert Graves

John Grisham

 

Suggested Reading by Rick Steves (Non-Fiction)

Paul Hoffman

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Frances Mayes

Susan Cahill

Luigi Barzini

Tim Parks

Edward Gibbon

Christopher Hibbert

Peter Murray

Anne Calcagno

For the Gourmets: The Marling Menu-Master for Italy