Books in the The Italian List - (Seagull Titles - CHUP) series

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.

Preface and third chapter translated from the Italian by Anne C. Tedeschi and John Tedeschi.

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.

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is the rare writer whose ideas and works have a broad appeal across many fields. In March 2009, Agamben was invited to speak in Paris' Notre-Dame Cathedral in the presence of the bishop of Paris and a number of other high-ranking church officials. This title presents this speech.

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