Antony Shugaar

Leonardo Patrignani

Alex and Jenny are sixteen. He lives in Milan; she, in Melbourne. For the past four years, they have glimpsed each other at random moments, while they are both unconscious - a telepathic communication that occurs without warning. During one of these episodes, they manage to arrange a meeting. But on the daym though they are standing in the same place at the same time, each of them cannot see the other. This leads them to a startling discovery; they live in different dimensions. And in Alex's world, Jenny died at the age of six. As they try to find each other, the Multiverse threatens to implode and disappear, but Jenny and Alex must meet - the future of the Earth depends on it.

Multiversum

Silvia Avallone

Enthralling their failing industrial town on the coast of Italy during a summer when they discover their budding sexuality, adolescents Anna and Francesca are separated by a test of their friendship and eventually discover that they must reconnect to escape small-town destinies. An award-winning first novel. 20,000 first printing.

Swimming to Elba

Nanni Balestrini

A tale inspired by the powerful and violent Camorra Italian organized crime network recently exposed by Roberto Saviano is narrated by a resigned victim who has surrendered to a savage existence in a small southern Italy town under the occupation of his Camorra neighbors. Original.

Sandokan

the golden age of travel, 1880-1940

Crossing America

Carmine Abate

Set in the Southern Italian countryside, the story of young Marco, his elder sister Elisa, and his father who must migrate to France in search of work is told in alternating voices.

The Homecoming Party

Massimo Carlotto

For All the Gold in the World

Paolo Apolito

In 1994, a devout Catholic woman from Vermont began having religious visions and hearing the voice of the Virgin Mary. To spread word about her mystical experiences, she turned to the Internet. As Paolo Apolito records here, she is only one of many people who use the Web as a tool of religious devotion. Every day, thousands of Catholics - from Italy and Latin America to the United States and Bosnia - use the Internet to describe and celebrate apparitions of Mary, to exchange relics and advice in chat rooms, to make pilgrimages to religious Web sites, and to practice the rites of their faith online. But how has this potent new mix of technology and religiosity changed the way Catholics view their faith? And what challenges do the autonomous qualities of the Internet pose to the broader authority of Catholicism? Does the democratic nature of access to digital technologies constitute a return to a more archaic and mystical form of Catholicism that predates the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council? In working through these questions, Apolito considers visions of Mary on the Web over the past two decades, revealing a great deal about religion as it is now experienced through new information technologies. The Internet, he explains, has made possible a decentralized community of the devoted, even as it has absorbed God into the shifts and complexities of electronic circuitry. And this profound development in religious life will only accelerate as use of the Internet spreads around the world. An indispensable guide to the future of Catholicism, The Internet and the Madonna offers a compelling glimpse into the spiritual life of the connected soul.

Religious Visionary Experience on the Web

The Internet and the Madonn

Giandomenico Romanelli

"Portrait of Venice presents a cultural tour of the most remarkable architecture and urban development throughout the history of this great city - from medieval times through Gothic, Renaissance, and neo-classical periods, and into the twentieth century. The works of architects and painters, and the monuments of the city's prominent families and rulers are captured here in over 450 color photographs. The text provides a history of the urban development of Venice, and promotes an understanding of the fascinating struggles and politics that influenced the current face of the city."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Portrait of Venice

Maurizio Viroli

Italy is a country of free political institutions, yet it has become a nation of servile courtesans, with Silvio Berlusconi as their prince. This is the controversial argument that Italian political philosopher and noted Machiavelli biographer Maurizio Viroli puts forward in The Liberty of Servants. Drawing upon the classical republican conception of liberty, Viroli shows that a people can be unfree even though they are not oppressed. This condition of unfreedom arises as a consequence of being subject to the arbitrary or enormous power of men like Berlusconi, who presides over Italy with his control of government and the media, immense wealth, and infamous lack of self-restraint. Challenging our most cherished notions about liberty, Viroli argues that even if a power like Berlusconi's has been established in the most legitimate manner and people are not denied their basic rights, the mere existence of such power makes those subject to it unfree. Most Italians, following the lead of their elites, lack the minimal moral qualities of free people, such as respect for the Constitution, the willingness to obey laws, and the readiness to discharge civic duties. As Viroli demonstrates, they exhibit instead the characteristics of servility, including flattery, blind devotion to powerful men, an inclination to lie, obsession with appearances, imitation, buffoonery, acquiescence, and docility. Accompanying these traits is a marked arrogance that is apparent among not only politicians but also ordinary citizens.

Berlusconi's Italy

The Liberty of Servants

Gianni Guadalupi

The Equator has no tangible existence beyond maps, but yet it lives, a hugely significant symbol in the minds and hearts of navigators, travellers, poets, madmen and dreamers of all eras. It is the world's girdle, its 24,000 miles or 38,640 kilometres passing through the Ecuadorian Andes and the mist-shrouded Ruwenzori Mountains, running along the courses of both the Amazon and the Congo rivers, and cutting through Africa's vast Lake Victoria, and the coral atolls and volcanic hulk of Krakatoa, in the Indian Ocean. The eminent Italian historian Gianni Guadalupi, and writer Antony Shugaar, have put together this inspirational collection of amazing equatorial adventures. Many have responded to the challenge of the Line, setting out to discover the mysterious source of the Nile, the perils of the Doldrums ('the living death in life' Coleridge called it') or the powerful force of El Niño, the quest for a lost Eden and for El Dorado. Others have sought a new life, like Elisa the 'nude Baroness' of the Galapagos, or Robert Louis Stevenson, for whom the fearsome King Tembinok built at Latitude Zero in the Gilbert Islands, an enclave named Equator City. So many grand expeditions and projects, so many great explorers and eccentrics, make this anthology a joyous voyage of discovery.

Tales of the Equator

Latitude Zero

International Spy Museum (Washington, D.C.)

Organized thematically into such categories as "Femme Fatales" or "The Traitor Next Door," a collection of spy biographies portrays the lives and careers of masters of espionage from around the world, with profiles of Mata Hari, Christopher Marlowe, Graham Greene, Aldrich Aimes, Robert Hansson, and many others. Original. 15,000 first printing.

Antony Shugaar

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