#hardcover #romance #relationship #family #novel #love

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Florida

When Valentine Roncalli discovers a long lost shoe design, a family secret unravels that helps her take control of the company from a conniving relative, but first she seeks the counsel, and more, of her ex-fiancee, Bret Fitzpatrick, to help re-boot the business while she pursues a hot romance with a handsome Italian from her past. By the best-selling author of Very Valentine. 200,000 first printing.

Brava, Valentine

d9df8845-8342-4c8a-b16f-4c043c28a1c8-1

Silvia Avalloné

Antony Shugaar

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Maryland

A Novel

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

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Advance readers edition, never read. #paperback #fiction #italy #naples

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

New York





As seen in the New York Times Book Review. 



Set in the passionate, intense, and crumbling neighborhood known as the Spanish Quarter of Naples, comes a tale of two students searching for love and belonging in the city they so desperately want to call home.



Years after leaving Naples with a broken heart, Heddi receives an email from her first love. Although she now lives in New Zealand, just the thought of the Spanish Quarter's narrow, winding streets sparks the pain of longing. Heddi had found her place in that city built on Roman ruins and set against a sleeping volcano. A place she wants to call home despite being l'americana or the American. For Heddi's group of university friends, Naples is either a refuge from their familial responsibilities or an entryway to a wider world. But for all of them, Naples was their real university of life: the setting of their unrestrained youth.

When Heddi first met Pietro at a party hosted by her bohemian roommates, she was inexplicably drawn to the serious geology student. Despite coming from wildly different backgrounds--Heddi, a nomadic American; Pietro, an Italian farm boy--the two fell into a liberating romance. She was searching for the roots she never had, while he tried to escape his. Yet even after the two were doomed to part ways, their story isn't finished just yet.

Inspired by her own 10-year search for belonging in Naples, author Heddi Goodrich gives readers a passionate tale of a life caught between two worlds and a heartfelt ode to first love--of a place, of a person-- where languages and cultures collide while dreams soar and crash in unexpected ways.

 

Lost in the Spanish Quarter

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Mary Laven

No writing or markings inside. There are remnants of a price sticker on the front cover. Y1fvvq

Massachusetts

Broken Vows and Cloistered Lives in the Renaissance Convent

Venice in the late Renaissance was a city of fabulous wealth, reckless creativity, and growing social unrest as its maritime empire crumbled. It was also a city of walls and secrets, ghettos, and cloisters-including fifty convents housing three thousand nuns, many of them refined, upper-class women who had been immured against their will. In this utterly fascinating book, Cambridge historian Mary Laven uncovers the long-hidden stories of the "virgins of Venice" and the secret, and often surprising, lives they led. Sifting through records kept during the Counter-Reformation, Laven has pieced together a detailed and dramatic tapestry of resourceful, determined, and passionate women who managed to lead fulfilling lives despite their virtual imprisonment. Far from being precincts of piety and silence, the convents of Venice were hotbeds of political scheming, colorful pageantry, gorgeous decoration, and illicit love affairs. One nun was so determined to sleep with her lover that she painstakingly chipped a hole in a stone wall so he could climb through under cover of night. Another expressed her individuality through obsessive gift giving while keeping records of the dangerous flirtations going on around her. Still others exercised considerable clandestine power in the dangerous game of Venetian politics. Rich in intrigue and gossip, eye opening in its historic revelations, and written with drama and compassion, Virgins of Venicebrings to life a culturally vibrant period in Venice and the hidden residents who dwelled behind its walls.

Virgins of Venice

1a4b9cce-f4cd-48b6-88b1-709e69391247-1

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

Colorado

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

4ad814d6-f790-4bbf-9b79-160eaecea681-1

#hardcover #historicalfiction #italy #victorian #crime #murder #suspense #thriller #turin #europe #serialkillers 

Turin, Italy 1887. When James Murray, a young Scottish doctor fascinated by the workings of the criminal mind, travels to the vibrant city of Turin, it is to study with Cesare Lombroso, the world-renowned criminologist. But just hours after his introduction to the unconventional Lombroso, the discovery of a horrifically mutilated body in the nearby Piazza Statuto--and a note that appears to implicate the celebrated criminologist himself--changes everything.With the help of his fellow apprentice, Ottolenghi; a local investigator, Tullio; and Lombroso's beautiful but enigmatic housekeeper, Sofia; Murray must put his learning to the test and endeavor to understand the mind of a malevolent serial killer, if he is to stop the rapidly escalating bloodbath and clear the name of his mentor.Have Lombroso's many enemies attempted to frame him? Are the notes an accusation or a challenge? And will Lombroso's own influential theories about criminal behavior hold the keys to Murray catching a cunning and ruthless killer?

City of Devils

e6f651f6-f5a6-433a-955f-c584d212cdab-1

James Holland

Oversized Paperback (4 to 6 lbs)

The Brutal Battle for Italy 1943

Acclaimed WWII historian James Holland's new book both recasts the controversial Italian Campaign and sets a new standard in the chronicling of war Following victory in Sicily, while the central command planned the spring 1944 invasion of France, Allied troops crossed into southern Italy in September 1943, expecting to drive Axis forces north and liberate Rome by Christmas. Italy quickly surrendered but German divisions fiercely resisted, and the hoped-for quick victory descended into one of the most challenging and protracted battles of the entire war. James Holland's The Savage Storm, chronicling the dramatic opening months of the Italian Campaign in unflinching and insightful detail, is unlike any campaign history yet written. Holland has always narrated war at ground level, but here goes further by chronicling events almost entirely through the contemporary eyes of those who were there on all sides and at all levels--Allied, Axis, civilians alike. Weaving together a wealth of letters, diaries, and other documents--from the likes of American General Mark Clark, German battalion commander Georg Zellner, Italian politician Filippo Caracciolo, and many others--Holland traces the battles as they were experienced across plains, over mountains, through shattered villages and cities, in intense heat and, towards the end of December 1943, frigid cold and relentless rain. Such close-up views persuade Holland to recast important aspects of the campaign, reappraising the reputation of Mark Clark himself and other senior commanders of the U.S. Fifth and British Eighth armies. Given the shortage of Allied shipping and materiel allocated to Italy because of the build-up for D-Day, more was expected of Allied troops in Italy than anywhere else, and a huge price was paid by everyone for each bloodily contested mile. Putting readers vividly in the moment as events unfolded, with characters made unforgettable by their own words, The Savage Storm is a defining account of the pivotal months leading to Monte Cassino, and a landmark in the writing about war.

The Savage Storm ARC

3fb30244-555b-424b-873b-005d3359d840-0

Robert Cocuzzo

Rhode Island

Fathers, Sons, and Cycling Across Italy

The Road to San Donato is an adventurous travel memoir of an American father and son tracing their Italian heritage by bicycle. With only the bare essentials on their backs, author Robert Cocuzzo and his sixty-four-year-old father, Stephen, embark on a torturous 425-mile ride from Florence, Italy, to San Donato Val di Comino, an ancient village hidden in the Apennine mountains from which their family emigrated a hundred years earlier. After getting lost, beaten down, and very nearly stranded, when they finally reach the village the Cocuzzos discover so much more than their own family story.

For many Jews in the 1940s, the road to San Donato was one of exile; during World War II, dozens were interned in the village. When the Nazis came to ship them off to death camps, however, many of the villagers went to heroic lengths to save their lives. Walking and pedaling through this history, Robert Cocuzzo is determined to learn the role his family played at the time.The Road to San Donato is a story of fathers and sons, discovering lost "cousins," valorous history, and the challenge and exhilaration of traveling by bicycle.

Road to San Donato

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Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Connecticut

Opera

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Lori Nelson Spielman

North Carolina

"The enduring bonds of sisterhood flourish in this heartwarming and dazzling Italian adventure, where a love that spans generations reveals the path to one woman's destiny, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Life List. When the fiercely independent and mysterious Paulina "Poppy" Fontana invites her great-nieces and fellow second-born daughters, Emilia and Lucy, to visit her birthplace of Italy, she makes a wild declaration. On her eightieth birthday, Poppy claims she'll meet the love of her life on the steps of the Ravello Cathedral and put an end to the Fontana Family Second-Daughter Curse once and for all. The Fontana Second-Daughter Curse is probably nothing but a coincidence, a self-fulfilling prophecy, an old-world myth. Even so, nobody can deny that for centuries, not a single second-born daughter in the Fontana family has married. But twenty-nine year-old Emilia actually appreciates the curse--some may even say she hides behind it. What might happen if the supposed curse is actually broken, and she's expected to find love? Reluctantly, the trio of second-born daughters embark on a journey to fulfill Poppy's last wish. Against a backdrop of lush Italian countryside and rich landmarks, Poppy shares family secrets and tales of forbidden love that threaten to upend every belief her young nieces have held to be true"--

The Star-Crossed Sisters of Tuscany

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Adriana Trigiani

Imperfection in printing on back cover-see picture 

Tennessee

From Adriana Trigiani, “a master of visual and palpable detail” (The Washington Post), comes a lush, immersive novel about three generations of Tuscan artisans with one remarkable secret. Epic in scope and resplendent with the glorious themes of identity and belonging, The Good Left Undone unfolds in breathtaking turns. Matelda, the Cabrelli family’s matriarch, has always been brusque and opinionated. Now, as she faces the end of her life, she is determined to share a long-held secret with her family about her own mother’s great love story: with her childhood friend, Silvio, and with dashing Scottish sea captain John Lawrie McVicars, the father Matelda never knew. . . . In the halcyon past, Domenica Cabrelli thrives in the coastal town of Viareggio until her beloved home becomes unsafe when Italy teeters on the brink of World War II. Her journey takes her from the rocky shores of Marseille to the mystical beauty of Scotland to the dangers of wartime Liverpool—where Italian Scots are imprisoned without cause—as Domenica experiences love, loss, and grief while she longs for home. A hundred years later, her daughter, Matelda, and her granddaughter, Anina, face the same big questions about life and their family’s legacy, while Matelda contemplates what is worth fighting for. But Matelda is running out of time, and the two timelines intersect and weave together in unexpected and heartbreaking ways that lead the family to shocking revelations and, ultimately, redemption.

The Good Left Undone

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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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Robert Rodi

Pennsylvania

My Quixotic Quest for Acceptance among Tuscany's Proudest People

Seven Seasons in Siena

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John Berendt

A #1 New York Times Bestseller!

"Funny, insightful, illuminating . . ." —The Boston Globe

Twelve years ago, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil exploded into a monumental success, residing a record-breaking four years on the New York Times bestseller list (longer than any work of fiction or nonfiction had before) and turning John Berendt into a household name. The City of Falling Angels is Berendt's first book since Midnight, and it immediately reminds one what all the fuss was about. Turning to the magic, mystery, and decadence of Venice, Berendt gradually reveals the truth behind a sensational fire that in 1996 destroyed the historic Fenice opera house. Encountering a rich cast of characters, Berendt tells a tale full of atmosphere and surprise as the stories build, one after the other, ultimately coming together to portray a world as finely drawn as a still-life painting.

Michigan

Frances Mayes

Excellent condition from a smoke-free home

Ohio

The Sweet Life in Italy

The author explores life in the idyllic Italian countryside, offering authentic Tuscan recipes and intimately portraying the local people and the environment

Bella Tuscany

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Andrea Bocelli

In this honest and engaging memoir, translated from the Italian, Bocelli talks as never before about his blindness, his early life, the importance of his family, stage fright, and the pressures of international stardom. Andrea Bocelli cannot remember a time when he was not passionate about music. Born among the vineyards and olive groves of Tuscany, Bocelli was only a few months old when his beautiful blue eyes began to fail due to glaucoma. "He suffered much, and it was difficult to calm him," his mother, Edi, explains. It was the music filtering into his room that would soothe the unsettled child. She says, "It seemed to be the reason for Andrea's tranquillity. I was happy because I had discovered something that gave him some relief from his pain." Bocelli's parents nurtured and encouraged his love of music. His passion for opera was also apparent, and he participated in local talent contests and won several prizes. At the age of twelve, however, Bocelli was completely blinded during a soccer game. Undeterred, he continued to sing, learning to read special Braille sheets and musical scores. It was only after he earned his law degree that he was inspired to attempt to join the ranks of the great tenors. Bocelli's persistence and devotion paid off during an audition in 1992 when he stunned Pavarotti with the seemingly effortless way he captured the essence of the song "Miserere." It was this performance that fueled Bocelli's rise from piano-bar performer to the phenomenal international success we all adore today. No fan of classical music can afford to be without the engaging and humble memoir of this fascinating, triumphant star.

The Music of Silence

396beb20-cbd5-4d19-aa32-aa413008ca7a-1

#hardcover #historicalfiction p12jnvd #italy

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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Meet the Roncalli and Angelini families, a vibrant cast of colorful characters who navigate tricky family dynamics with hilarity and brio, from magical Manhattan to the picturesque hills of bella Italia. Very Valentine is the first novel in a trilogy and is sure to be the new favorite of Trigiani's millions of fans around the world. In this luscious, contemporary family saga, the Angelini Shoe Company, makers of exquisite wedding shoes since 1903, is one of the last family-owned businesses in Greenwich Village. The company is on the verge of financial collapse. It falls to thirty-three-year-old Valentine Roncalli, the talented and determined apprentice to her grandmother, the master artisan Teodora Angelini, to bring the family's old-world craftsmanship into the twenty-first century and save the company from ruin. While juggling a budding romance with dashing chef Roman Falconi, her duty to her family, and a design challenge presented by a prestigious department store, Valentine returns to Italy with her grandmother to learn new techniques and seek one-of-a-kind materials for building a pair of glorious shoes to beat their rivals. There, in Tuscany, Naples, and on the Isle of Capri, a family secret is revealed as Valentine discovers her artistic voice and much more, turning her life and the family business upside down in ways she never expected. Very Valentine is a sumptuous treat, a journey of dreams fulfilled, a celebration of love and loss filled with Trigiani's trademark heart and humor.

Very Valentine

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The Cooking of Italy

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

Escaping the aunt who wants to adopt only one of them, two orphaned brothers run away from Hamburg to Venice, finding shelter with a gang of street children and their leader, the thirteen-year-old "Thief Lord," while also eluding the detective hired to return them to Germany.

The Thief Lord

43631c6d-235a-433a-b41b-04d26971a9fb-1

David I. Kertzer

Ex-library copy with typical internal stamps/markings - Binding cracked apart in places (pictured)

New Jersey

The Extraordinary Story of How a Jewish Child, Made a Prisoner of the Vatican in 1858, Ended the Rule of the Popes in Italy

When Edgardo Mortara was an infant, a Catholic servant girl had him baptized because she feared he might die. At nightfall on June 23, 1858, in Bologna, Italy, a squad of police kidnapped the boy because, according to Church teaching, no Christian child could be raised by Jews. David I. Kertzer shows that what happened to the boy and his parents would eventually help fuel a revolution leading to the establishment of a unified Italian state and the collapse of papal power in Italy.

The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara

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John Grisham

Cut from the Cleveland Browns after the worst performance in the history of the NFL, Rick Dockery, desperate to play football, is hired by the Panthers of Parma, Italy, and finds himself confronted by the confusing diversity of Italian culture, language,a

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Adriana Trigiani

Brava, Valentine

Silvia Avalloné; Antony Shugaar

Swimming to Elba

Heddi Goodrich

Lost in the Spanish Quarter

Mary Laven

Virgins of Venice

John Berendt

The City of Falling Angels

Diana Bretherick

City of Devils

James Holland

The Savage Storm ARC

Robert Cocuzzo

Road to San Donato

Herbert Kupferberg

Opera

Lori Nelson Spielman

The Star-Crossed Sisters of Tuscany

Adriana Trigiani

The Good Left Undone

Diana Giovinazzo

Antoinette's Sister

Robert Rodi

Seven Seasons in Siena

John Berendt

The City of Falling Angels

Frances Mayes

Bella Tuscany

Andrea Bocelli

The Music of Silence

Sarah Dunant

Sacred Hearts

John Berendt

The City of Falling Angels

Adriana Trigiani

Very Valentine

Waverly Root

The Cooking of Italy

John Berendt

The City of Falling Angels

Cornelia Funke; Oliver Latsch (Translator); Christian Burmingham (Illustrator)

The Thief Lord

David I. Kertzer

The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara

John Grisham

Playing for Pizza