Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo

Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo PDF Author: Tim Parks
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393348822
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
The bestselling author of "Italian Neighbors" returns with a wry and revealing portrait of Italian life--by riding its trains.

Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo

Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo PDF Author: Tim Parks
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393348822
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
The bestselling author of "Italian Neighbors" returns with a wry and revealing portrait of Italian life--by riding its trains.

Italian Ways

Italian Ways PDF Author: Tim Parks
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1448162521
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
‘All Italy is here’ Sunday Times From the bestselling author of Italian Neighbours, An Italian Education and A Season with Verona Longlisted for the Dolman Travel Book Award In 1981 Tim Parks moved from England to Italy and spent the next thirty years alongside hundreds of thousands of Italians on his adopted country’s vast, various and ever-changing networks of trains. Through memorable encounters with ordinary Italians – conductors and ticket collectors, priests and prostitutes, scholars and lovers, gypsies and immigrants – Tim Parks captures what makes Italian life distinctive. He explores how trains helped build Italy and how the railways reflect Italians’ sense of themselves from Garibaldi to Mussolini to Berlusconi and beyond.

Italian Neighbors

Italian Neighbors PDF Author: Tim Parks
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 0802191150
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year: A deliciously entertaining account of expatriate life in a small village just outside Verona, Italy. Tim Parks is anything but a gentleman in Verona. So after ten years of living with his Italian wife, Rita, in a typical provincial Italian neighborhood, the novelist found that he had inadvertently collected a gallery full of splendid characters. In this wittily observed account, Parks introduces readers to his home town, with a statue of the Virgin at one end of the street, a derelict bottle factory at the other, and a wealth of exotic flora and fauna in between. Via Colombare, the village’s main street, offers an exemplary hodgepodge of all that is new and old in the bel paese, a point of collision between invading suburbia and diehard peasant tradition. It is a world of creeping vines, stuccoed walls, shotguns, security cameras, hypochondria, and expensive sports cars. More than a mere travelogue, Italian Neighbors is a vivid portrait of the real Italy and a compelling story of how even the most foreign people and places gradually assume the familiarity of home. “One of the most delightful travelogues imaginable . . . so vivid, so packed with delectable details.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

An Italian Education

An Italian Education PDF Author: Tim Parks
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 0802191142
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
A “marvelous” Mediterranean memoir of an expatriate father raising his children in Italy—from the author of Italian Neighbors (The Washington Post). Tim Parks offers another lively firsthand account of Italian society and culture—this time focusing on all the little things that turn an ordinary newborn infant into a true Italian. When British-born Tim Parks heard a mother at the beach in Pescara shout to her son, “Alberto, don’t sweat! No you can’t go in the sea till eleven, it’s still too cold, go and see your cousin in row three number fifty-two,” he was inspired to write about parenting in Italy—which he was doing himself at the time after adopting the country as his own. In this humorous memoir, Parks offers an enchanting portrait of Italian childhood that shifts from comedy to despair in the time it takes to sing a lullaby. The result is “a wry, thoughtful, and often hilarious book . . . a parable of how our children, no matter what, are other than ourselves” (The New Yorker). “Glimpses of Italy that are fond, critical, pithy and penetrating.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Medici Money

Medici Money PDF Author: Tim Parks
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1847656870
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
The Medici are famous as the rulers of Florence at the high point of the Renaissance. Their power derived from the family bank, and this book tells the fascinating, frequently bloody story of the family and the dramatic development and collapse of their bank (from Cosimo who took it over in 1419 to his grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent who presided over its precipitous decline). The Medici faced two apparently insuperable problems: how did a banker deal with the fact that the Church regarded interest as a sin and had made it illegal? How in a small republic like Florence could he avoid having his wealth taken away by taxation? But the bank became indispensable to the Church. And the family completely subverted Florence's claims to being democratic. They ran the city. Medici Money explores a crucial moment in the passage from the Middle Ages to the Modern world, a moment when our own attitudes to money and morals were being formed. To read this book is to understand how much the Renaissance has to tell us about our own world. Medici Money is one of the launch titles in a new series, Atlas Books, edited by James Atlas. Atlas Books pairs fine writers with stories of the economic forces that have shaped the world, in a new genre - the business book as literature.

Literary Tour of Italy

Literary Tour of Italy PDF Author: Tim Parks
Publisher: Alma Books
ISBN: 1846883687
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
An acclaimed author of novels and short stories, Tim Parks - who was described in a recent review as "e;one of the best living writers of English"e; - has delighted audiences around the world with his finely observed writings on all aspects of Italian life and customs. This volume contains a selection of his best essays on the literature of his adopted country.From Boccaccio and Machiavelli through to Moravia and Tabucchi, from the Stil Novo to Divisionism, across centuries of history and intellectual movements, these essays will give English readers, and lovers of the Bel Paese and its culture, the lay of the literary land of Italy.

The Pursuit of Italy

The Pursuit of Italy PDF Author: David Gilmour
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466801549
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 670

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Book Description
One of The Economist's Books of the Year A provocative, entertaining account of Italy's diverse riches, its hopes and dreams, its past and present Did Garibaldi do Italy a disservice when he helped its disparate parts achieve unity? Was the goal of political unification a mistake? The question is asked and answered in a number of ways in The Pursuit of Italy, an engaging, original consideration of the many histories that contribute to the brilliance—and weakness—of Italy today. David Gilmour's wonderfully readable exploration of Italian life over the centuries is filled with provocative anecdotes as well as personal observations, and is peopled by the great figures of the Italian past—from Cicero and Virgil to the controversial politicians of the twentieth century. His wise account of the Risorgimento debunks the nationalistic myths that surround it, though he paints a sympathetic portrait of Giuseppe Verdi, a beloved hero of the era. Gilmour shows that the glory of Italy has always lain in its regions, with their distinctive art, civic cultures, identities, and cuisines. Italy's inhabitants identified themselves not as Italians but as Tuscans and Venetians, Sicilians and Lombards, Neapolitans and Genoese. Italy's strength and culture still come from its regions rather than from its misconceived, mishandled notion of a unified nation.

Adultery and Other Diversions

Adultery and Other Diversions PDF Author: Tim Parks
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
ISBN: 9781559704700
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Brilliant, probing, and provocative reflections from the author of the bestselling "Italian Neighbors" and "An Italian Education".

Out of My Head

Out of My Head PDF Author: Tim Parks
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 168137398X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Adventures in cutting-edge ideas about consciousness, from bestselling non-fiction writer Tim Parks. Hardly a day goes by without some discussion about whether computers can be conscious, whether our universe is some kind of simulation, whether mind is a unique quality of human beings or spread out across the universe like butter on bread. Most philosophers believe that our experience is locked inside our skulls, an unreliable representation of a quite different reality outside. Colour, smell and sound, they tell us, occur only in our heads. Yet when neuroscientists look inside our brains to see what's going on, they find only billions of neurons exchanging electrical impulses and releasing chemical substances. Five years ago, in a chance conversation, Tim Parks came across a radical new theory of consciousness that undercut this interpretation. This set him off on a quest to discover more about this fascinating topic and also led him to observe his own experience with immense attention. Out of My Head tells the gripping, highly personal, often surprisingly funny, story of Tim Parks' quest to discover more about this fascinating topic. It frames complex metaphysical considerations and technical laboratory experiments in terms we can all understand. Above all, it invites us to see space, time, colour and smell, sounds and sensations in an entirely new way. The world will feel more real after reading it.

Stories for the Years

Stories for the Years PDF Author: Luigi Pirandello
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300255667
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
Regarded as one of Europe’s great modernists, Pirandello was also a master storyteller, a fine observer of the drama of daily life with a remarkable sense of the crushing burdens of class, gender, and social conventions. Set in the author’s birthplace of Sicily, where the arid terrain and isolated villages map the fragile interior world of his characters, and in Rome, where modern life threatens centuries-old traditions, these original stories are sun baked with the deep lore of Italian folktales. In “The Jar,” a broken earthenware pot pits its owner, a quarrelsome landholder, against a clever inventor of a mysterious glue. “The Dearly Departed” tells the story of a young widow and her new husband on their honeymoon, haunted at every turn by the sly visage of the deceased. The scorned lover, the despondent widow, the intransigent bureaucrat, the wretched peasant—Pirandello’s characters expose the human condition in all its fatalism, injustice, and raw beauty. For lovers of Calvino and Pasolini, these picturesque stories preserve a memory of an Italy long gone, but one whose recurring concerns still speak to us today.