Alumni Travel Reading 2018-2019: Flavors Northern Italy

Representing Italy through Food examines the romantic perceptions of Italy and its food, how these perceptions originate, and how they continue to this day: from the media, to literature to film and television, from cookbooks to social media, and from marketing campaigns to advertisements.

In The Medieval Kitchen, historians Redon, Sabban, and Serventi uncover the cuisine of Italy and France during the Middle Ages.

This book reveals the preparation, eating, and the sociability of dining in Renaissance Italy. It takes readers behind the scenes to the Renaissance kitchen and dining room, where everyday meals as well as lavish banquets were prepared and consumed.

The food of Rome and its region, Lazio, is known for herbs, olive oil, ricotta, lamb, and pork--the food of ordinary, yet modern people. yet it is a very modern cuisine in that it gives pride of place to the essential flavors of its ingredients. Oretta Zanini De Vita provides a social history of Rome and Lazio through the story of its food. Her text includes more than 250 recipes dating from antiquity through the Middle Ages to the mid-twentieth century.

Food scholar Carole M. Counihan presents a compelling narrative about family and food in late 20th-century Florence.

From medieval Milan's marketplace to the banqueting halls of Renaissance Ferrara; from street stalls in nineteenth-century Naples to the noisy trattorie of postwar Rome, historian and storyteller John Dickie shows how taste, creativity, and civic pride blended with power, political violence, and intrigue to create Italian cuisine.

A fresh look at Leonardo da Vinci's formative years in Florence and Milan provides a radically different scenario of how he created his signature style that would transform Western art forever. It reveals how the young Leonardo struggled against the prevailing style of his master Verrocchio and how his exceptional talent remained largely unrecognized right up to the Last Supper.

The Last Supper, a painted curated by Leonardo Da Vinci in the late 1400's, has weathered much erosion throughout its extensive history in the Santa Maria Della Grazie church. While many have attempted to restore this incredible and timeless piece, author Pinin Brambilla Barcilon has been the latest to bring this work back to life, having reconstructed the painting over the last twenty years. This novel is the timeline of her work--providing images and descriptions of her process each step of the way.

A detailed account of how Leonardo Da Vinci's work throughout the late 15th century transformed art as the world knew it.

An accessible, richly illustrated book focusing on the villas and environs of Orta, Maggiore, Como, and Garda.

Another lushly illustrated book on the villas in the Lake District but with additional coverage, not included in the other titles, of Lake Como. In Italian and English.

A useful overview to the art and architecture of Milan.

This title examines the painting, sculpture, decorative arts, and architecture produced in nine important court cities of Italy during the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries.

Twenty tales by Italian authors ranging from Boccaccio in the Middle Ages to Giacomo Casanova in the eighteenth century, to Pier-Paolo Pasolini in the twentieth and contemporary new writers such as Melania Mazzucco and Igiaba Scego.

Tim Parks - who was described in a recent review as "one of the best living writers of English" - has delighted audiences around the world with his finely observed writing on all aspects of Italian life and customs. This volume contains a selection of his best essays on the literature of his adopted country.

Time runs slowly in a sleepy Tuscan village once renowned for its thermal baths ... until the arrival of Ottone Gattai, a ruthless businessman who has come to this idyllic countryside to revive the legendary baths as an ultra-modern tourist resort. This satirical first novel by a brilliant young Italian writer is the story of a personal war against a commodified modernization

This novel, a finalist for the Booker Prize, follows a sorrowful man desperate for the love of a woman with whom he had an affair. In this dark but comical novel, the reader bears witness to the protagonist's frantic and provoking inner-monologue as he travels through Italy in an attempt to regain his former lover's attention.

A selection of some of Stryk's most renowned poems about the dualistic nature of the village of Lombardy, which is filled with both immense beauty, and a dark past.

A novel of Italy in the 70s -- hope, aspiration, and fate. New fiction from Italy.