Recommended Books & Films

Recommended Reading

General & History -- Luigi Barzini's The Italians (Macmillan) should almost be required reading for anyone contemplating a trip to Italy. The section on Sicily alone is worth the price of the book, which is hailed as the liveliest analysis yet of the Italian character.

Edward Gibbon's 1776 The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is published in six volumes, but Penguin issues a manageable abridgement. It has been noted as one of the greatest histories ever written.

One of the best books on the long history of the papacy -- detailing its excesses, its triumphs and defeats, and its most vivid characters -- is Michael Walsh's An Illustrated History of the Popes: Saint Peter to John Paul II (St. Martin's Press).

Art & Architecture -- One of the best accounts of the Renaissance is Peter Murray's The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance (Schocken). The same subject is covered by Frederick N. Hartt in his History of Italian Renaissance Painting (Abrams).

Giorgio Vasari's The Lives of the Most Eminent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors was published in 1550, and it remains the definitive work on Renaissance artists -- by one who knew many of them personally -- from Cimabue to Michelangelo. Penguin Classics issues a paperback abridged version, called Lives of the Artists.

Fiction & Biography -- Writers have tried to capture the peculiar nature of Italy in such notable works as Thomas Mann's Death in Venice (Random House) and E. M. Forster's A Room with a View (Random House). Fred M. Stewart spins a lively tale in Century (NAL), tracing the saga of several generations of an Italian family.

Umberto Eco is popular worldwide, and his first blockbuster murder mystery The Name of the Rose (Harcourt Brace) can be an entertaining primer on the political and monastic world of medieval Italy.

The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (Penguin Classics) was first printed in Italy in 1728, although Cellini lived from 1500 to 1571. This Renaissance romp is filled with gossip and interesting details; it launched the Romantic Movement.

The novels of Alberto Moravia (1907-90) are classified as neorealism. Moravia is one of the best-known Italian writers read in English. Notable works include Roman Tales (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), The Woman of Rome (Penguin), and The Conformist (Greenwood Press).

Michelangelo's life was novelized (and later made into a movie) by Irving Stone in The Agony and the Ecstasy (Doubleday), which also offers an insight into the Florentine politics of the day.

Recommended Viewing

Italian films have never regained the glory enjoyed in the postwar era. The golden oldies are still the best.

Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1946) influenced Hollywood's films noir of the late 1940s. Set in a poor section of occupied Rome, the film tells the story of a partisan priest and a Communist who aid the resistance.

Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief (1948) achieved world renown. Also set in one of Rome's poor districts, it tells of the destruction of a child's illusions and the solitude of a steel worker.

The Leopard (1963), set in Sicily, gained a world audience for Luchino Visconti and was the first major Italian film made in color.

Federico Fellini burst into Italian cinema with his highly individual style, beginning with La Strada (1954) and going on to such classics as Juliet of the Spirits (1965), Amarcord (1974), and The City of Women (1980). La Dolce Vita (1961) helped to define an era.

Marxist, homosexual, and practicing Catholic, Pier Paolo Pasolini was the most controversial of Italian filmmakers until his mysterious murder in 1975. Explicit sex scenes in Decameron (1971) made it a world box-office hit.

Bernardo Bertolucci, once an assistant to Pasolini, achieved fame with such films as The Conformist (1970), based on the novel by Moravia. One of his biggest international films was Last Tango in Paris (1971), starring Marlon Brando.

Other acclaimed Italian directors include the Taviani brothers. Their Padre Padrone (1977) takes place in Sardinia, and their Kaos (1984) is set in Sicily and is an adaptation of a Pirandello story. Their late-1980s film Good Morning, Babylon brought worldwide acclaim.

Cinema Paradiso, directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, won an Academy Award in 1989. Fellini's Intervista (1992) is a film within a film, where the director discusses his movies and the actors who starred in them. The Station (1992), directed by Sergio Rubini in a debut, is a bittersweet account of how love and unexpected excitement come to an all-night station manager in a tiny town in Italy's heel.

Excitement was generated by Il Ladro di Bambini (directed by Gianni Amelio), released in English in 1993 as Stolen Children. It was nominated for an Academy Award in 1993.

Ralph Fiennes starred in Director Anthony Minghella's The English Patient (1996), which used many small towns in Tuscany for its setting. Minghella also directed The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), with its wonderful scenes of Italy. Cher, impersonating Peggy Guggenheim, appeared in Tea with Mussolini (1999), a semiautobiographical tale from the early life of director Franco Zeffirelli. Frances Mayes's Under the Tuscan Sun (2003), directed by Audrey Wells, was as light as a gentle glass of wine and just as enjoyable.

Russell Crowe won an Oscar for his appearance in Ridley Scott's Gladiator (2000). Matera, Italy, served as the backdrop for the crucifixion in Mel Gibson's controversial The Passion of the Christ (2004); this film had more preticket sales than any other in history.