Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Mississippi

A Novel

Venice, a long time ago. Three prominent Venetians await their most loathsome and foul dinner guest, the erstwhile envoy from the Queen of Britain: the rascal-Fool Pocket. This trio of cunning plotters—the merchant, Antonio; the senator, Montressor Brabantio; and the naval officer, Iago—have lured Pocket to a dark dungeon, promising an evening of sprits and debauchery with a rare Amontillado sherry and Brabantio's beautiful daughter, Portia. But their invitation is, of course, bogus. The wine is drugged. The girl isn't even in the city limits. Desperate to rid themselves once and for all of the man who has consistently foiled their grand quest for power and wealth, they have lured him to his death. (How can such a small man, be such a huge obstacle?). But this Fool is no fool . . . and he's got more than a few tricks (and hand gestures) up his sleeve. Greed, revenge, deception, lust, and a giant (but lovable) sea monster combine to create another hilarious and bawdy tale from modern comic genius, Christopher Moore. Note: The book, too, is a veritable work of art. Rich creamy stock is enhanced by two-color printing, featuring part/chapter titles, running heads, and folios printed in red ink. The text block has blue-stained edges. The book opens to reveal two-page spread endpapers decorated with a sepia-toned antique map of Venice; an antique map of Italy graces the book’s front matter, printed in red. The jacket sports a matte finish with embossed author and title type; gold foil embellishes the title and illustration detail.

The Serpent of Venice

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Maryland

“A riveting adventure for the soul . . . just the kind of evocative historical fiction I love.”—Sara Gruen, author of At the Water’s Edge and Water for Elephants An epic, inspiring novel about one woman’s survival in the hardscrabble Italian countryside and her determination to protect her family throughout the Second World War—by any means possible Maria Vittoria is twenty-five when her father brings home the man who will become her husband. It is 1923 in the austere Italian mountain village where her family has lived for generations, and the man she sees is tall and handsome and has survived the First World War without any noticeable scars. Taking just the linens she has sewn that make up her dowry and a statue of the Madonna that sits by her bedside, Maria leaves the only life she has ever known to begin a family. But her future will not be what she imagines. The Madonna of the Mountains follows Maria over the next three decades, as she moves to the town where she and her husband become shopkeepers, through the birth of their five children, through the hardships and cruelties of the National Fascist Party Rule and the Second World War. Struggling with the cost of survival at a time when food is scarce and allegiances are questioned, Maria trusts no one and fears everyone—her Fascist cousin, the madwoman from her childhood, her watchful neighbors, the Nazis and the Partisans who show up hungry at her door. As Maria’s children grow up and her marriage endures its own hardships, she must hold her family together with resilience, love, and faith, until she makes a fateful decision that will change the course of all their lives. A sweeping saga about womanhood, loyalty, war, religion, family, food, motherhood, and marriage, The Madonna of the Mountains is a poignant look at the span of one woman’s life as the rules change and her world becomes unrecognizable. In depicting the great cost of war and the ineluctable power of time on a life, Elise Valmorbida has created an unforgettable portrait of a woman navigating both the unforeseen and the inevitable. Advance praise for Madonna of the Mountains “The moral and ethical questions raised propel the story beyond the particulars into the universal.”—Kirkus Reviews “It is a bewitching but entirely unsentimental portrait of one woman’s attempt to keep her family safe in turbulent times.”—The Times (UK), Book of the Month “A solid choice for readers who appreciate layered family sagas.”—Library Journal

The Madonna of the Mountains (First Edition)

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North Carolina

Traces the aftermath of the 1996 Venice opera house fire, an event that devastated Venetian society and was investigated by the author, who through interviews with local figures learned about the region's rich cultural history.

The City of Falling Angels

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Advance readers edition. #advancereadersedition #arc #advancereadercopy #fiction #romance #italy #paperback

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

New York

One of the Wall Street Journal's "Six Books to Read This Winter" The Italian Party by Christina Lynch is a delicious and sharply funny page-turner about “innocent” Americans abroad in 1950s Siena "Imagine Beautiful Ruins plus horses; Toujours Provence with spies, a mystery and sex. The Italian Party is a fizzy, page-turning delight that begs for a Campari and soda!" —Julia Claiborne Johnson, author of Be Frank With Me "Tremendous fun! Wives with big secrets, husbands with bigger ones, swirling around a 1950s Siena teeming with seduction and spycraft." —Chris Pavone, New York Times bestselling author of The Travelers and The Expats Newly married, Scottie and Michael are seduced by Tuscany's famous beauty. But the secrets they are keeping from each other force them beneath the splendid surface to a more complex view of ltaly, America and each other. When Scottie’s Italian teacher—a teenager with secrets of his own—disappears, her search for him leads her to discover other, darker truths about herself, her husband and her country. Michael’s dedication to saving the world from communism crumbles as he begins to see that he is a pawn in a much different game. Driven apart by lies, Michael and Scottie must find their way through a maze of history, memory, hate and love to a new kind of complicated truth. Half glamorous fun, half an examination of America's role in the world, and filled with sun-dappled pasta lunches, prosecco, charming spies and horse racing, The Italian Party is a smart pleasure.

The Italian Party

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Florida

This magnificent book provides a tantalizing taster of the beauty of Italy from its city and townscapes to its incomparable countryside.

To cover all of Italy's numerous charms, this book has been assembled in broad regional sections: Northwest Italy and the Ligurian Coast; Northeast Italy, Venice, and the Veneto; Central Italy, Southern Italy and Sicily.

All in all, this wonderful book, full of huge and stunning photographs, is an essential requirement for everyone who loves Italy, her people, her culture, and her food, as well as her towns, cities, and countryside.

Italy

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While visiting Rome, Toto befriends a lost cat who joins the sightseeing tour and causes a commotion before being reunited with his owner. Features some basic Italian words in the text and on lining papers.

Toto in Italy

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#hardcover #fiction #adult #contemporary #italy #literaryfiction #travel 

Texas

"New Yorkers Michael, a famous writer, and Lizzie, a journalist, travel to Italy with their friends from Maine--Finn, his wife Taylor, and their daughter Snow. 'From the beginning,' says Taylor, 'it was a conspiracy for Lizzie and Finn to be together.' Told Rashomon-style in alternating points of view, the characters expose and stumble upon lies and infidelities past and present"

Siracusa

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Kentucky

Few places on earth have escaped the singular eye of Norman Lewis, but always, in the course of his long career, he has come back to Sicily. From his first, wartime visit - to a land untouched since the Middle Ages - through his frequent returns, he has watched the island and its people as they have changed over the years. In 1998 he returned yet again to write this book, the result of a sixty-year-long fascination with all things Sicilian.
In Sicily reveals this fascination on every page. Throughout there is the Mafia, and Lewis's friendships with policemen, journalists and men of respect. But more, he writes of landscape and language, of his memories of his first father-in-law (professional gambler, descendant of princes and member of the Unione Siciliana), of Sicily's changing sexual mores, of the effects of African immigration, of Palermo and its ruined palaces - and of strange superstitions, of witches and bandits and murder.


In Sicily

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Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

A bestselling Italian writer makes her American debut with this delightful dramedy of manners, family, romance, and fashion that is set on the island of Sardinia at the end of the nineteenth century--a dazzling and original literary blend of Jane Austen and Adriana Trigiani.

In 1900 Sardinia, a young woman's remarkable talent with a needle earns her a position as a seamstress with a wealthy family. Inside this privileged world far different from her own humble beginnings, the skilled sewer quietly takes measurements, sketches designs, mends hems--and in the silence, hears whispered secrets and stories of all those around her.

Through the watchful young seamstress's eyes, this small Italian city and its residents emerge in all their vitality, vanity, and fragility--flawed yet congenial people who are not quite what they pretend to be. There is the Marchesa Esther, who rides horses and studies mechanics and ancient Greek; Miss Lily Rose, a spirited American journalist who commissions a special corset--with pockets to hide more than just her flaws; the Provera sisters with their expensive Parisian fashions that belie their financial hardships; and Assuntina, the wild child. There are men, young, old, and in between; love affairs and broken hearts; and even a murder (or was it suicide?). And at the center, watching and waiting is the seamstress herself, an intelligent, ambitious girl with a tender heart and her own impossible dream.

An irresistible literary confection rich in atmosphere and period detail and packed with compelling characters. The Seamstress of Sardinia transports us to a long-ago world not so removed from our own--to a society rigidly divided by wealth and shaped by passion, hope, ambition, and love--the elemental forces that drive human lives.

The Seamstress of Sardinia ARC

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Dreaming of Tuscany

#paperback #fiction #historicalfiction #romance #italy #christinalynch

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

A delicious and sharply funny page-turner about "innocent" Americans abroad in 1950s Siena, Italy.

One of theWall Street Journal's "Six More Books to Read This Winter"*"Required Reading,"The New York Post*Library Journal's "Spring/Summer Bests" of 2018*ASonoma Index-TribuneBestseller*One ofCrimeReads' "Debuts to Discover Spring 2018"

"[A] sweltering thriller set against the backdrop of what is probably your dream getaway destination: Tuscany."--Bustle

"Tremendous fun! Wives with big secrets, husbands with bigger ones, swirling around a 1950s Siena teeming with seduction and spycraft."--Chris Pavone,New York Timesbestselling author ofThe Travelers

Newly married, Scottie and Michael are seduced by Tuscany's famous beauty. But the secrets they are keeping from each other force them beneath the splendid surface to a more complex view of ltaly, America and each other.

When Scottie's Italian teacher--a teenager with secrets of his own--disappears, her search for him leads her to discover other, darker truths about herself, her husband and her country. Michael's dedication to saving the world from communism crumbles as he begins to see that he is a pawn in a much different game. Driven apart by lies, Michael and Scottie must find their way through a maze of history, memory, hate and love to a new kind of complicated truth.

Half glamorous fun, half an examination of America's role in the world, and filled with sun-dappled pasta lunches, prosecco, charming spies and horse racing,The Italian Partyby Christina Lynch is a smart pleasure.

The guilty Ones

The night thief

The patient man

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

California

The Race to Rescue a Nation's Treasures from the Nazis

When Hitler's armies occupied Italy in 1943, they also seized control of mankind's greatest cultural treasures. As they had done throughout Europe, the Nazis could now plunder the masterpieces of the Renaissance, the treasures of the Vatican, and the antiquities of the Roman Empire.

On the eve of the Allied invasion, General Dwight Eisenhower empowered a new kind of soldier to protect these historic riches. In May 1944 two unlikely American heroes--artist Deane Keller and scholar Fred Hartt--embarked from Naples on the treasure hunt of a lifetime, tracking billions of dollars of missing art, including works by Michelangelo, Donatello, Titian, Caravaggio, and Botticelli.

With the German army retreating up the Italian peninsula, orders came from the highest levels of the Nazi government to transport truckloads of art north across the border into the Reich. Standing in the way was General Karl Wolff, a top-level Nazi officer. As German forces blew up the magnificent bridges of Florence, General Wolff commandeered the great collections of the Uffizi Gallery and Pitti Palace, later risking his life to negotiate a secret Nazi surrender with American spymaster Allen Dulles.

Brilliantly researched and vividly written, Saving Italy brings readers from Milan and the near destruction of The Last Supper to the inner sanctum of the Vatican and behind closed doors with the preeminent Allied and Axis leaders: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Churchill; Hitler, Göring, and Himmler.

An unforgettable story of epic thievery and political intrigue, Saving Italy is a testament to heroism on behalf of art, culture, and history.

Saving Italy

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Utah

"They did not mean to hurt the boy, much less kill him. They only wanted to teach him a lesson."
A stunning family saga set in Ireland and Italy, Lucina's Letters is a gripping character study that explores the deep, dark repercussions of one long-ago deed.
Family has always been of the utmost importance to Lucina, but when she learns the truth about an event that almost ripped the family apart, she sets about mending the familial bond even if her efforts are from beyond the grave.
One well-timed letter allows her to bring the family together and drag not just one secret but many into the light.
But what will the consequences be; will the now-grown-up girls come to terms with their actions on that fateful day and subsequently their own struggles in life? Were the messenger's intentions just honourable and will the truth set them free and restore the family unit once again?

Lucina's Letters

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#hardcover #historicalfiction p12jnvd #italy

Massachusetts

The year is 1570, and in the convent of Santa Caterina, in the Italian city of Ferrara, noblewomen find space to pursue their lives under God’s protection. But any community, however smoothly run, suffers tremors when it takes in someone by force. And the arrival of Santa Caterina’s new novice setsin motion a chain of events that will shake the convent to its core.

Ripped by her family from an illicit love affair, sixteen-year-old Serafina is willful, emotional, sharp, and defiant–young enough to have a life to look forward to and old enough to know when that life is being cut short. Her first night inside the walls is spent in an incandescent rage so violent that the dispensary mistress, Suora Zuana, is dispatched to the girl’s cell to sedate her. Thus begins a complex relationship of trust and betrayal between the young rebel and the clever, scholarly nun, for whom the girl becomes the daughter she will never have.

As Serafina rails against her incarceration, others are drawn into the drama: the ancient, mysterious Suora Magdalena–with her history of visions and ecstasies–locked in her cell; the ferociously devout novice mistress Suora Umiliana, who comes to see in the postulant a way to extend her influence; and, watching it all, the abbess, Madonna Chiara, a woman as fluent in politics as she is in prayer. As disorder and rebellion mount, it is the abbess’s job to keep the convent stable while, outside its walls, the dictates of the Counter-Reformation begin to purge the Catholic Church and impose on the nunneries a regime of terrible oppression.

Sarah Dunant, the bestselling author ofThe Birth of Venusand In theCompany of the Courtesan, brings this intricate Renaissance world compellingly to life. AmidSacred Heartsis a rich, engrossing, multifaceted love story, encompassing the passions of the flesh, the exultation of the spirit, and the deep, enduring power of friendship.

Sacred Hearts

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Price was cut out if front cover (see pic) #hardcover #adventure #italy 

Idaho

A Paul Stuart Novel (1)

The best-selling author of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series returns with an irresistible new novel about one man's adventures in the Italian countryside.

Paul Stuart, a renowned food writer, finds himself at loose ends after his longtime girlfriend leaves him for her personal trainer. To cheer him up, Paul's editor, Gloria, encourages him to finish his latest cookbook on-site in Tuscany, hoping that a change of scenery (plus the occasional truffled pasta and glass of red wine) will offer a cure for both heartache and writer's block. But upon Paul's arrival, things don't quite go as planned. A mishap with his rental-car reservation leaves him stranded, until a newfound friend leads him to an intriguing alternative: a bulldozer.

With little choice in the matter, Paul accepts the offer, and as he journeys (well, slowly trundles) into the idyllic hillside town of Montalcino, he discovers that the bulldozer may be the least of the surprises that await him. What follows is a delightful romp through the lush sights and flavors of the Tuscan countryside, as Paul encounters a rich cast of characters, including a young American woman who awakens in him something unexpected.

A feast for the senses and a poignant meditation on the complexity of human relationships, My Italian Bulldozer is a charming and intensely satisfying love story for anyone who has ever dreamed of a fresh start.

My Italian Bulldozer

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#historicalfiction #1700s #18thcentury #habsburg #italy 

Kansas

Bursting with intrigue, adventure, and romance, Antoinette's Sister expertly brings to life one of history's most formidable European monarchs: a woman who upended societal conventions for the betterment of her people as Queen of Naples, and who courageously lived--and loved--on her own terms. Austria 1767: Maria Carolina Charlotte--third daughter and sixteenth child of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria--knows her position as a Hapsburg archduchess will inevitably force her to leave her home, her family, and her beloved country. But not yet. The Hapsburg family is celebrating a great triumph: Charlotte's younger sister, Josepha, has been promised to King Ferdinand IV of Naples, and will soon take her place as queen. Before Josepha can journey to her new home, however, tragedy strikes: after visiting the family crypt, Josepha contracts smallpox and dies. Embroiled in grief, Charlotte is forced to face an unthinkable new reality. Mired in grief, Charlotte is forced to face an unthinkable new reality: she must now marry Ferdinand in her sister's stead. Bereft and alone, Charlotte finds that her new life in Naples is more complicated than she could ever have imagined. Ferdinand is weak and feckless, and a disastrous wedding night plunges her into despair. Her husband's regent, Tenucci, is a controlling and power-hungry man who has pushed the country to the brink of ruin. Overwhelmed, she asks her brother Leopold, now the Holy Roman Emperor, to send help--which he does in the form of John Acton, a handsome military man twenty years Charlotte's senior who is tasked to take over the Navy. Now, Charlotte must gather the strength to do what her mother did before her: take control of a country. In a time of political uprisings, royal executions, and refugee crises, how is a young monarch to keep hold of everything--and everyone--she loves? Find out in this sweeping, luxurious tale of family, court intrigue, and power.

Antoinette's Sister

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#hardcover #fiction #europe #italy #florence #womanspower 

Georgia

A tall, yellow-haired young European traveler calling himself 'Mogor dell'Amore', the Mughal of Love, arrives at the court of the Emperor Akbar, lord of the great Mughal empire, with a tale to tell that begins to obsess the imperial capital.

The Enchantress of Florence

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#hardcover #nonfiction #travel #history  #venice #italy #thecityoffallingangels #johnberendt #truecrime #arson

Pennsylvania

#paperback #fiction #mystery #thriller #killer #historical #Italy 

Ohio

The Talented Mr. RIPLEY 

#hardcover #nonfiction #fiction #travel #history #non #italy #venice 

Colorado

Delaware

An immigrant saga reminiscent of Roots begins in a small Italian village and spans three generations and two world wars to capture the essence of the Italian-American experience. 300,000 first printing. $300,000 ad/promo. Tour.

Christopher Moore

The Serpent of Venice

Elise Valmorbida

The Madonna of the Mountains (First Edition)

John Berendt

The City of Falling Angels

Christina Lynch

The Italian Party

Michael Heatley

Italy

Biddy Strevens

Toto in Italy

Delia Ephron

Siracusa

Norman Lewis

In Sicily

Bianca Pitzorno

The Seamstress of Sardinia ARC

T.A. Williams

Dreaming of Tuscany

Christina Lynch

The Italian Party

Joy Ellis

The guilty Ones

Joy Ellis

The night thief

joy Ellis

The patient man

Robert M. Edsel

Saving Italy

Barbara Francesca Murphy

Lucina's Letters

Sarah Dunant

Sacred Hearts

Alexander McCall Smith

My Italian Bulldozer

Diana Giovinazzo

Antoinette's Sister

Salman Rushdie

The Enchantress of Florence

John Berendt

The City of Falling Angels

Patricia Highsmith

The Talented Mr. RIPLEY

John Berendt

The City of Falling Angels

Gay Talese

Unto the Sons