Books in the The Italian List series

Widely considered to be among the most important Italian poets of the twentieth century, Sandro Penna was born and raised in Perugia but spent most of his life in Rome. Openly gay, Penna wrote verses celebrating homosexual love with lyrical elegance. His writing alternates between whimsy and melancholia, but it is always full of light. Juggling traditional Italian prosody and subject matter with their gritty urban opposites in taut, highly concentrated poems, Penna‿s lyrics revel in love and the eruption of Eros together with the extraordinary that can be found within simple everyday life. There is something ancient in Penna‿s poetry, and something Etruscan or Greek about the poems, though the landscape is most often of Rome: sensual yet severe, sinuous yet solid, inscrutable, intangible, and languorous, with a Sphinx-like and sun-soaked smile. Penna‿s city is eternal‿a mythically decadent Rome that brings to mind Paris or Alexandria. And though the echoes resound‿from Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Baudelaire to Leopardi, D‿Annunzio, and Cavafy‿the voice is always undeniably and wonderfully Penna‿s own. Â

A philosophical exploration of what capitalistic societies truly mean for the individual. A short vade mecum for unrepentant materialism, The Idea of World collects three essays by Italian philosopher Paulo Virno that are intricately wrapped around one another. The first essay, "Mundanity," tries to clarify what the term "world," as referred to as the perceptual and historical context of our existence, means-both with and against Kant and Wittgenstein. How should we understand expressions such as "worldly people," "the course of the world," or "getting by in this world"? The second, "Virtuosity and Revolution," is a minor political treatise. Virno puts forward a set of concepts capable of confronting the magnetic storm that has knocked out the compasses that every reflection on the public sphere has relied on since the seventeenth century. The third, "The Use of Life", is the shorthand delineation of a research program on the notion of use. What exactly are we doing when we use a hammer, a time span, or an ironic sentence? And, above all, what does the use of the self-of one's own life, which lies at the basis of all uses-amount to in human existence? Presenting his ideas in three distinct vignettes, Virno examines how the philosophy of language, anthropology, and political theory are inextricably linked.

From the idyll of his Sardinian childhood to the transformative experience of the anti-Fascist resistance, and from postwar militancy to the dismal regression of Italian culture, the author captures memories that are intensely personal and inseparable from political and intellectual experience.

A translation of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's work, in which the author notes that academic research has lingered on the "pagan goddess," while the concept of "elemental spirit," ignored by scholars, is vital to the history of iconography.

An introduction to Franco Fortini, a Jewish communist and a major figure in postwar Italian intellectual life. It is against those who love to rush to the aid of the victors, against the widespread and racist contempt for Arabs, and against the celebration of modern civilization and technology that Israel embodies.

A collection of essays on the mysteries of the body from one of Italy‿s leading postwar communist intellectuals. Politician, translator, and journalist Rossana Rossanda was the most important female left-wing intellectual in post-war Italy. Central to the Italian Communist Party‿s cultural wing during the 1950s and ‿60s, she left an indelible mark on the life of the mind. The essays in this volume, however, bring together Rossanda‿s reflections on the body‿how it ages, how it is gendered, what it means to examine one‿s own body. The product of a decades-long dialogue with the Italian women‿s movement (above all with Lea Melandri, a vital feminist writer who provides an afterword to the current volume), these essays represent an honest and raw meeting between communist and feminist thought. Ranging from reflections on her own hands through to Chinese cinema, from figures such as the Russian cross-dressing soldier Nadezhda Durova to the Jacobin revolutionary Theroigne de Mericourt, here we see Rossanda‿s fierce intellect and extraordinary breadth of knowledge applied to the body as a central question of human experience.