About this item
A poignant personal account from a child of Calabrian peasants whose lifelong study of Italy unveils the mysteries of this Bel Paese, Beautiful Land, where artistic genius and political corruption have gone hand in hand from the time of Michelangelo to The SopranosThe child of Italian immigrants and an award-winning scholar of Italian literature, in My Two Italies Joseph Luzzi straddles these two perspectives to link his familys dramatic story to Italys north-south divide, its quest for a unifying language, and its passion for art, food, and family.From his Calabrian fathers time as a military internee in Nazi Germany-where he had a love affair with a local Bavarian woman-to his adventures amid the Renaissance splendor of Florence, Luzzi creates a deeply personal portrait of Italy that leaps past facile clichs about Mafia madness and Tuscan sun therapy.
About the Author
Joseph Luzzi holds a doctorate from Yale and teaches at Bard. He is the author of the memoir, IN A DARK WOOD: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love (HarperCollins) , a meditation on the power of great literature to guide us in our most difficult times. Other books include MY TWO ITALIES (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) , the dramatic story of his Italian family's immigration and an insider's look at life in Italy, past and present.
An active critic, Luzzi has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Bookforum, the Times Literary Supplement, and many others. His first book, ROMANTIC EUROPE AND THE GHOST OF ITALY (Yale) , received the MLA's Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies, and he is also the author of A CINEMA OF POETRY: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film (Johns Hopkins) . His work has been translated or is forthcoming in Italian, German, Portuguese, and Korean, and he lectures widely on art, film, and literature.
