Author: Ann Crabb
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472119494
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
The first full study of the life of Margherita Datini illuminates the role and social standing of wives in early modern Italian society
Author: Iris Origo
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 168137420X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
A warm, intimate, and engrossing biography of Francesco di Marco Datini, who built a powerful mercantile network in fourteenth-century Tuscany, and a peerless evocation of the sensations, personalities, and everyday struggles of Italian life more than half a millennium in the past. “For God and Profit” is how the medieval merchant Francesco di Marco Datini headed a notebook in which he kept track of his business dealings, and these were certainly his guiding lights. Born in the 1330s in the Tuscan town of Prato, the son of a poor taverner, Datini set out at the age of fifteen for Avignon, where, over the course of the next thirty-five years, he made a fortune trading in arms, armor, artworks, wool, saffron, leather, silk, and much more. Returning home, he expanded his operations, setting up offices all across the Mediterranean, which he oversaw through an unceasing flow of correspondence. When he died, Datini asked that all his papers be preserved in his house, and in 1870 they were found, a little worm-eaten and mouse-nibbled but largely intact, in a sack under the stairs. They are one of the great records not only of medieval life but of the emergence of the modern commercial world. Drawing on this rich archive, Iris Origo offers a wonderfully vivid account of Datini’s public and private worlds. The Merchant of Prato is a masterpiece of modern narrative history.
Author: Iris Origo
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681374218
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 470
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Book Description
A warm, intimate, and engrossing biography of Francesco di Marco Datini, who built a powerful mercantile network in fourteenth-century Tuscany, and a peerless evocation of the sensations, personalities, and everyday struggles of Italian life more than half a millennium in the past. “For God and Profit” is how the medieval merchant Francesco di Marco Datini headed a notebook in which he kept track of his business dealings, and these were certainly his guiding lights. Born in the 1330s in the Tuscan town of Prato, the son of a poor taverner, Datini set out at the age of fifteen for Avignon, where, over the course of the next thirty-five years, he made a fortune trading in arms, armor, artworks, wool, saffron, leather, silk, and much more. Returning home, he expanded his operations, setting up offices all across the Mediterranean, which he oversaw through an unceasing flow of correspondence. When he died, Datini asked that all his papers be preserved in his house, and in 1870 they were found, a little worm-eaten and mouse-nibbled but largely intact, in a sack under the stairs. They are one of the great records not only of medieval life but of the emergence of the modern commercial world. Drawing on this rich archive, Iris Origo offers a wonderfully vivid account of Datini’s public and private worlds. The Merchant of Prato is a masterpiece of modern narrative history.
Author: Margherita Datini
Publisher: Iter
ISBN: 9780772721167
Category : Florence (Italy)
Languages : en
Pages : 431
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Book Description
Author: Christiane Klapisch-Zuber
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226439267
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
English translations of the author's most important articles.
Author: Ann Crabb
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472109128
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 346
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Book Description
Enter the turbulent world of a Florentine family through personal correspondence
Author: Katherine A. McIver
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442248955
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 139
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Book Description
The modern twenty-first century kitchen has an array of time saving equipment for preparing a meal: a state of the art stove and refrigerator, a microwave oven, a food processor, a blender and a variety of topnotch pots, pans and utensils. We take so much for granted as we prepare the modern meal – not just in terms of equipment, but also the ingredients, without needing to worry about availability or seasonality. We cook with gas or electricity – at the turn of the switch we have instant heat. But it wasn’t always so. Just step back a few centuries to say the 1300s and we’d find quite a different kitchen, if there was one at all. We might only have a fireplace in the main living space of a small cottage. If we were lucky enough to have a kitchen, the majority of the cooking would be done over an open hearth, we’d build a fire of wood or coal and move a cauldron over the fire to prepare a stew or soup. A drink might be heated or kept warm in a long-handled saucepan, set on its own trivet beside the fire. Food could be fried in a pan, grilled on a gridiron, or turned on a spit. We might put together a small improvised oven for baking. Regulating the heat of the open flame was a demanding task. Cooking on an open hearth was an all-embracing way of life and most upscale kitchens had more than one fireplace with chimneys for ventilation. One fireplace was kept burning at a low, steady heat at all times for simmering or boiling water and the others used for grilling on a spit over glowing, radiant embers. This is quite a different situation than in our modern era – unless we were out camping and cooking over an open fire. In this book Katherine McIver explores the medieval kitchen from its location and layout (like Francesco Datini of Prato two kitchens), to its equipment (the hearth, the fuels, vessels and implements) and how they were used, to who did the cooking (man or woman) and who helped. We’ll look at the variety of ingredients (spices, herbs, meats, fruits, vegetables), food preservation and production (salted fish, cured meats, cheese making) and look through recipes, cookbooks and gastronomic texts to complete the picture of cooking in the medieval kitchen. Along the way, she looks at illustrations like the miniatures from the Tacuinum Sanitatis (a medieval health handbook), as well as paintings and engravings, to give us an idea of the workings of a medieval kitchen including hearth cooking, the equipment used, how cheese was made, harvesting ingredients, among other things. She explores medieval cookbooks such works as Anonimo Veneziano, Libro per cuoco (fourtheenth century), Anonimo Toscano, Libro della cucina (fourteenth century), Anonimo Napoletano (end of thirteenth/early fourteenth century), Liber de coquina, Anonimo Medidonale, Due libri di cucina (fourteenth century), Magninus Mediolanensis (Maino de’ Maineri), Opusculum de saporibus (fourteenth century), Johannes Bockenheim, Il registro di cucina (fifteenth century), Maestro Martino’s Il Libro de arte coquinaria (fifteenth century) and Bartolomeo Sacchi, called Platina’s On Right Pleasure and Good Health (1470). This is the story of the medieval kitchen and its operation from the thirteenth-century until the late fifteenth-century.
Author: Giovanni Caselli
Publisher: Peter Bedrick Books
ISBN: 9780872261075
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 36
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Book Description
Presents a story of a rich merchant, Francesco Datini, and his household in northern Italy in the late fourteenth century, seen from the viewpoint of a slave, depicting the merchant's life in the town of Prato and his work in nearby Florence.
Author: Laura Wangerin
Publisher:
ISBN: 0472131397
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245
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Book Description
What makes a successful government?
Author: Marlena de Blasi
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0345481097
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 370
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Book Description
They had met and married on perilously short acquaintance, she an American chef and food writer, he a Venetian banker. Now they were taking another audacious leap, unstitching their ties with exquisite Venice to live in a roughly renovated stable in Tuscany. Once again, it was love at first sight. Love for the timeless countryside and the ancient village of San Casciano dei Bagni, for the local vintage and the magnificent cooking, for the Tuscan sky and the friendly church bells. Love especially for old Barlozzo, the village mago, who escorts the newcomers to Tuscany’s seasonal festivals; gives them roasted country bread drizzled with just-pressed olive oil; invites them to gather chestnuts, harvest grapes, hunt truffles; and teaches them to caress the simple pleasures of each precious day. It’s Barlozzo who guides them across the minefields of village history and into the warm and fiercely beating heart of love itself. A Thousand Days in Tuscany is set in one of the most beautiful places on earth–and tucked into its fragrant corners are luscious recipes (including one for the only true bruschetta) directly from the author’s private collection.
