Some suggested Holiday reading
Here are some books we’ve enjoyed, if you’re looking for some Italian-themed holiday reading. You could also try contacting this excellent bookshop, which arranges its stock by country, for their suggestions: http://www.dauntbooks.co.uk/index.html
Non-fiction:
Iris Origo, The Merchant of Prato – a very readable account of the daily life of a 14th century Tuscan merchant, based on the letters and documents in his archive.
Tom Holland, Rubicon – popular history recounting the end of the Roman Republic.
Rudolph M. Bell, How to do it – Italian social history based on Renaissance self help guides.
Matt Frei, Italy. The Unfinished Revolution – a series of essays taking an unsentimental look at modern Italy, by the BBC’s Rome correspondent of the mid 1990s.
Tobias Jones, The Dark Heart of Italy – a provocative and unashamedly polemical look at the darker aspects of modern Italy, centring on the figure of Berlusconi.
Ross King, Brunelleschi’s Dome - popular history of how the cupola of the Duomo in Florence was built.
Janet Kinrade Dethick, The Trasimene Line – how the allies fought their way up through Central Italy in the summer of 1944.
Fiction:
Umberto Eco, Baudolino – tall tales from the Middle Ages as recounted by a mendacious peasant.
Iain Pears, The Raphael Affair - novel about an art detective and the discovery of an unknown Raphael.
Barry Unsworth, Stone Virgin - an English art restorer in Venice is transported back to the world of the statue he is restoring.
Janice Elliott, The Italian Lesson - the English in Tuscany.
Anthony Capella, The Food of Love - a retelling of Cyrano de Bergerac, cast as a chef in modern-day Rome in which mouth-watering Roman cuisine, rather than poetry, is the food of love.
Niccolo Ammaniti, I’m not scared – young lad discovers a frightening secret in an abandoned Italian farmhouse.
Memoirs:
Joan Marble, Notes from an Italian Garden - restoring a house and garden North of Rome.
Frances Mayes, Under The Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany – both books mix accounts of local life and food with the author’s experiences restoring a house in Cortona (also a film).
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