Omnibus Italian Romance and Passion by Jayne Castel

These are four realistic-feeling tales whose romantic stories begin, as many modern love stories do, with passion and a strong physical attraction. However each couple featured in the stories has the potential build their relationship into a more loving and lasting one.

In each story the female protagonist is a woman from an English-speaking country visiting Italy for family, pleasure and work, and she becomes involved with an Italian man.

The four short romance stories in the Omnibus:

• A Roman Summer
• Neapolitan Encounter
• Florentine Awakening
• Venetian Distraction

Each story is well-written escapist fiction that moves along quickly with just enough detail to put the reader in Italy and in the interesting scenes. The author is clearly familiar with Italian culture and language, which adds more realism to the stories.

I especially enjoyed the realistic portrayal of the western women's point of view on Italy. The protagonist of A Roman Summer, for example, is a first time visitor to Italy. Her first impressions when exhausted concern women's struggles with sexual harassment, the heat in summer, the difficulty of managing uneven cobblestones in heels, the horrible traffic and the deafening noise.

The protagonist of Neapolitan Encounter thinks at one especially difficult point in her story:

She'd just about had enough of Italian men today.

When the women are rested they notice the many fashionable men, the ever-present facade in behavior, the sexual directness and volatile expressiveness of many Italians, and the beauty of the non-modern architecture. They notice the food, too, of course. Each of the women show their appreciation for the food, with one protagonist thinking:

The men could be odious here but the food was incredible.

Eventually she learns to appreciate the good qualities of one Italian man in particular.

Like all good short stories, the endings stimulate the readers' imagination to invent their own future for the protagonists, with the writer providing clues to use as starting points. The books are clean with no sex scenes detailed, only suggested. I enjoyed the short escapes to Italy very much!

From the book's description:

A collection of contemporary romance novellas set in Rome, Naples, Florence and Venice - that will sweep you away!

From Rome's dolce vita and the gritty streets of Naples, to the rolling hills of Tuscany and the twisting canals of Venice, four 'must-reads' for romance fans who are passionate about Italy.

A Roman Summer

Kay Starling visits Rome with the hope of persuading her sister to give up her Roman lover and return home to her responsibilities. However, she hadn't counted on falling for Alessandro Falcone - the brooding brother of her sister's lover...

Neapolitan Encounter

Luisa Durasanti witnesses a mafia shooting on the streets of Naples - an incident that turns her dream holiday into a nightmare. Of course, her attraction to Commissario Valerio Catanese, the enigmatic police inspector in charge of the investigation, is just an added complication...

Florentine Awakening

Vanessa Woods' romantic holiday in Tuscany with her boyfriend is quickly turning into a disaster. When her relationship disintegrates, it takes a few days in Florence, and a young chef named Marco Tirelli to take Vanessa's Tuscan holiday in an entirely unexpected direction...

Venetian Distraction

Faye Wilson is in Venice for the Biennale, to do a story on one of Italy's most promising young artists - Massimiliano Paolini. When the interview escalates into an argument, Faye storms off, determined never to set eyes on Max Paolini again. However, she doesn't suspect what the evening has in store for her...

Here is a direct link to the Omnibus at Amazon.com:

 

Please visit the prolific author's website/blog.

Bus 64 - Roma by Umberto Bartolomeo

This collection of 48 short stories is by far the best self-published book I have read to date.  The quality of writing is inspiring and on par with award-winning literary short-story collections.  The appeal for Italophiles is that the author brings Rome, Italy, and Italians to life for the reader, with literary skill and a deep understanding of the human heart.

After just the first few paragraphs, I felt like I was in strong, capable, literary arms.  I love the conversational yet authoritative tone, and all the local lore, history, humor, erudition, psychological understanding, and heart that enrich the stories about people, not caricatures, and about daily life in Rome.

Here is the premise behind the collection of overlapping stories:

Welcome aboard this book about a bus...

Our narrator is a passenger on Rome's Bus 64, and he invites us to join him for the ride from beginning to end.  Along the way, expertly drawing us along with him, he introduces us to the driver and some of the other passengers, letting us into their hearts and minds, into their lives and professions:  a businessman, a restaurateur, an architect, a housewife, mother, servant, the unemployed, tourists, immigrants, the pensioned... 

Have you read The Canterbury Tales, or The Decameron?  This is a modern-day version written with Kurt Vonnegut-esque wit, with the characters mingling and showing their best and worst sides to our omniscient narrator, and through him, to us.

   

Rome is a character in the stories, too.  We are treated to snapshots of Rome:  her bridges, streets, monuments, filth and crowds.

Too many monumental structures that are too close together, too heavily embellished, constructed too ambitiously for forever.

And we get to meet Rome's people:

...some people here seem to have stepped through a time-warp -- old Romans being recycled with a mere change of costume.

The author takes us on a journey from the stories Rome--Caput Mundi and Waiting for our Driver, to The End of the Line and Buona Notte!! on "...a public bus, frill-less and elemental...".  We feel the press of messy humanity around us in Rome, with people from all over the world, coming together on a city bus. 

With Chekovian psychological subtlety, the author helps us explore Rome's and the characters' sights, visitors, smells, frailties, passions, sins, rigid thoughts, biases, bowels, dreams, sins, goals and mortality.  He exposes to us the characters' various world views.

There is much humor to lighten the tales that roam "...Rome's video-game streets..." but it is the author's way with words, his ability to turn a phrase, that is the greatest pleasure on this journey from the Vatican to the Stazione Termini.

"...loafing in the easy chair of one's body."

"...fraternitas, the civic bond that men needed if they were to live together like true men?"

"This was a feigned mildness, though, the mask worn by the immigrant."

"Death's time-worn road was well paved now, it seemed."

Characters, once introduced in their own stories, sometimes outside of the bus, return within stories about other passengers.  By the end of the collection, we have become part of a small community of players, acting and interacting on the author's mobile stage:  Bus 64.

Some themes connect the stories, such as the recurring sense of time passing, eras changing, cultures clashing, personalities exerting their uniqueness to the frustration of other characters. 

The author demonstrates a wise awareness of the human condition that goes beyond time and age and experience, suggesting that he is not like the character in the book whom he describes as:

She had passed her whole life as does everyone, rushing and dreaming in blind, deaf refusal of the miracle of each moment.

While never indulging in pathos, the reader will feel their heart warn to a few of the characters, like the rose-selling street-woman.

We know nothing about this old woman, while her twinkling fox-eyes seem to know very much about us.  They know about our car and our flat with its lock and its furniture.  About our refrigerator humming, stocked and waiting.  Our paychecks and savings, our pillowed bed and television, our vacations and insurance, our watch, thermostat and wardrobe.  As we take the rose from her hand, we see her wizened face against the starry sky.  And she sees us.  And she is watching, closely watching. ... it was through her that we stepped somehow, for brief moments, out of time.  [excerpt: Pantheon Rose]

If you enjoy reading quality, polished, moving, expert, psychologically astute writing, then Bus 64 - Roma is the book for you.  Take your time with the stories.  Embrace the diverse characters.  I promise you that by the end of the collection, you will feel that you have been a passenger on Bus 64, and that you have met and known several dozen Romans and visitors to Rome.  Travel virtually to the Caput Mundi.

I'll leave you with a quote from a story about a man who lives in one of the government-housing apartment buildings on the periphery of Rome, with the families stacked in cubicle-like housing reminiscent of ancient Rome's insulae:

From a dozen other windows came the anchor-man's stern voice, with the latest details of what you already knew:  that the world was in chaos and that war, crime and money were the sun, moon and stars.

From the book's description:

Rome's notoriously crowded BUS 64 crawls from the Vatican, through the historic center, to Stazione Termini... crammed inside are the priest, butcher, tourist, gypsy, secretary, business tycoon, homeless schizophrenic, African immigrant... all pressed much too close for comfort.

Teeming with the thoughts, dreams and passions of modern Romans, and the sights, sounds, and smells of the Eternal City, the 49 stories in BUS 64 continually shift gears between elegy, satire, whimsy, shocking realism, fable, and more... each style riveting in its quite different way.

As the loaded bus plods on, readers will catch whiffs of authors ranging from Boccaccio to Steinbeck, Henry Miller to Hans Christian Andersen, all fused in a mature literary voice all its own. Filled with wit and acute perceptions - emotional, psychological, physical and spiritual - this high-spirited portrait of Rome has got edge, heart, guts, and verbal artistry. Above all, it has the FEEL of Rome.

If you know and love Rome, BUS 64 will delight you. And if you haven't been there, a ride through this book is almost as good as a visit.

Here are direct links to the book at Amazon.com:

This review is by Candida Martinelli, of Candida Martinelli's Italophile Site, and the author of the cozy-murder-mystery novel AN EXTRA VIRGIN PRESSING MURDER, and the young-adult/adult mystery novel series THE VIOLET STRANGE MYSTERIES the first book of which is VIOLET'S PROBLEM.

Daisy Miller by Henry James

This classic novella from 1879, roughly fifty pages long, is by America's foremost novelist, Henry James (b.1843-d.1916), a master of the psychological novel.  The novella is in the public domain, so it is free to download as an e-book from a source I provide below.

You may know Henry James as a writer of heavy, dense prose, but this novella is closer in style to writer Edith Wharton:  conversational, gossipy, often humorous description of relations between men and women of a certain class during the Belle Epoch, with a serious ending.

 

Illustration of a woman offering her help to Daisy, from an illustrated book version of Daisy Miller, free PDF link below

The novella is written in two parts.  The first part of the novella is set in Vevey, Switzerland, a favorite resort location for travelers on the Grand Tour of Europe, next to Lake Geneva, and a stopover before taking the journey through the Alpine passes into Italy.  The second part of the novel is set in Rome, Italy, which was generally the stop before Naples and Pompeii for the Grand Tour tourist.

Rome, Italy, in 1879 is unlike Rome of today.  The Roman sights were open to the public without any fee, and without any closing times.  But it was also home to malaria, in that time before D.D.T. spraying.  A visit to Rome could be deadly.

Illustration of the narrator, from an illustrated book version of Daisy Miller, free PDF link below 

The narrator of the novella is Winterbourne, a spoiled, rich, indulgent, lazy young man, who spends most of him time courting older women in Switzerland.  Winterbourne tells the story of his acquaintance with Annie P. Miller (Daisy Miller), a poorly educated, spoiled, wealthy American woman with an unpolished character and a coquettish demeanor, and an Aspergers-like incomprehension of social niceties and acceptable social behavior.

Daisy is rather brainless.  To her, Europe means hotels, trains, new dresses in Paris.

...Europe was perfectly sweet.  She was not disappointed--not a bit.  She had ever so many intimate friends that had been there ever so many times.

And then she had had ever so many dresses and things from Paris.  Whenever she put on a Paris dress she felt as if she were in Europe.

Here is a clip from a 1974 film-adaptation with a truly awful performance by Cybil Shepard, but it does stick very faithfully to the book, and it was filled on location, this scene at Vevey, Switzerland.

 Illustration of an Italian fan of Daisy's, from an illustrated book version of Daisy Miller, free PDF link below

Winterbourne meets Daisy at Vevey and writes her off as a pretty American flirt with low morals, or at least rather dense, thick, unsophisticated in the way of the world, and the in the rules of propriety. 

...an extraordinary mixture of innocence and crudity...

...continued to present herself as an inscrutable combination of audacity and innocence...

...naturally indelicate...

...audacity and puerility...

 Illustration of a critic of Daisy's, from an illustrated book version of Daisy Miller, free PDF link below

Daisy's mother and young brother are equally dense and inappropriate.  Daisy's mother is like a doormat for her strong-willed, spoiled daughter.  Daisy's beauty and wealth has insulated her from much of the criticism that her behavior causes.  But we learn that fashionable New York City society has deemed Daisy uncouth, the product of new money from the girl's businessman father.  She is the like the daughters on MTV's Sweet Sixteen show, raging idiots untamed by their cowed, new-money mothers.

Henry James's story of Daisy Miller's dangerous folly was a common theme at the time.  Other books warned new-money mothers and young women and their fathers of the dangers they ran trying to fit into high-society without understanding the rules of behavior:  The Hazards of New Wealth by W. D. Howells, The Sword of Damocles by A. K. Green, The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, to name a few.

 Illustration depicting the dangers of malaria in Rome, from an illustrated book version of Daisy Miller, free PDF link below

Daisy Miller, as described by Henry James, is a classic Aspergers.  She has an attractive face, an expensive wardrobe, a limited range of emotions, and she is clueless about societal norms and accepted behaviors.  She cannot understand social clues or cues.  But her wealth and beauty have given her an arrogance and self-assurance that takes blows when her poor decisions have serious consequences. 

It is an interesting and even entertaining read, written in a lighter style than usual for Henry James.  The depictions of people and their psychology always rings true.  The portraits of expatriate life in Switzerland and Rome in the late 1800s are drawn by a man who knew the locales well.  If you enjoy Edith Wharton, you will enjoy Daisy Miller.

Daisy Miller,...

Buy This at Allposters.com

A still-image from a 1974 film adaptation of Daisy Miller

The novella Daisy Miller is in the public domain and available to download for free in various e-book formats from Project Gutenberg, the grand-daddy of free e-books on the Internet.

Direct link to the Daisy Miller e-book download page

If you wish to see the book as it was originally published, with beautiful illustrations, and download a PDF book made from the scanned paged for free, here is the link at the Internet Archive, a wonderful resource for free e-book on-line.

Direct link to the Daisy Miller viewer page and e-book download page

Henry James adapted the novella for the stage, changing the sad ending for a happy one, in an attempt to pander to theatre-goers.  If you are interested in this version, here is a direct link to the un-produced play as it was printed in a book, available for free as in various e-book formats, including a PDF of the scanned pages of the original book, at the Internet Archive.

Direct link to the play Daisy Miller viewer page and e-book download page

If you are interested, here is a link to the Wikipedia page for Daisy Miller, but I suggest you read the novella first, form your own opinion, then read the page, or other critical articles about the story.

Direct link to the Daisy Miller Page

If you wish to purchase a print version of Daisy Miller, or the 1974 film adaptation, here are direct links to the products at Amazon.com.

This review is by Candida Martinelli, of Candida Martinelli's Italophile Site, and the author of the cozy-murder-mystery novel AN EXTRA VIRGIN PRESSING MURDER, and the young-adult/adult mystery novel series THE VIOLET STRANGE MYSTERIES the first book of which is VIOLET'S PROBLEM.

Italian Canadians at Table edited by Loretta Gatto-White & Delia De Santis

Italian Canadians at Table: A Narrative Feast in Five Courses is a collection of essays about Italian food and life and the lives of several Canadian writers, many of whom are Italian-Canadian.  I requested a review-copy of this book because I love to read/review books about the hyphenated Italian experience.

Divided into sections corresponding to an Italian menu, the essays are arranged under the headings:  Antipasto, Primo, Secondo, Contorno, Dolce.  The locating of essays in a section did seem, at times, random, such as the "pasta" essay in the "Antipasto" section rather than the "Primo" section; and the "fruit" essay in the "Antipasto" section rather than the "Dolce" section; and the "turkey" essays in the "Primo" section rather than the "Secondo" section.

The Introduction is an amusing summary of the culinary tastes of an immigrant nation.  Canada's immigrants came/come from all over the world, just as in The United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand.  Descendents of Italian immigrants form a large part of the populations of each of these countries, but it is only recently that the food of their ancestors, predominantly southern Italians, has become chic.

 

 

The editors identify a recent change in eating patterns of those Italian-Canadians and Canadians at large:

We want the rustic produce and products directly out of the farmer's field or the artisan's hand, to gather-up our families' generations on Sunday and share boldly coloured and flavourful food from big steaming majolica platters.  We'll plant heritage tomatoes amongst the genteel delphiniums in our urban courtyards, challenge city hall for our right to raise chickens and wood-roast peppers in midtown backyards, forage in city parks for spring cicoria, and take courses on how to cure and hang our own Berkshire Pork prosciutto in downtown lofts. ... The cucina casalinga and cucina povera are the new haute cuisines.

This change in fashion has had an effect on Italian-Canadians:  they now see their immigrant parents and grandparents in a new light.  Gardens and orchards that produced the foods they were used to, might once have been an embarrassment.  Home-cured meats and homemade breads and wines were things that school friends often eyed warily and caused feelings of shame in the writers.  Now, those things are desired by Italian-Canadians and non-Italian-Canadians alike!

 

 

Central to the recollections is that "in Italian communities, rapport building has long been based on the gentle gesture of breaking bread".  Food memories are some of the most resilient because they touch all of our five senses, so food can bring comfort in the form of the good memories it elicits.  The essays take the form of biography, memoirs, poetry, anecdotes, even songs.

The authors often relate how they felt as children, compared to how they feel today about their relatives' generosity when it came to food and the house-guest.  Shame has been replaced by understanding, amusement, and even pride.  There is a recognition that the attempt to keep up childhood-learned food rituals are actually a way to remember who one is, and where one came from.

 

 

Before reading this book, I had only ever read essays on food by well-known writers in The New Yorker magazine.  I knew from those essays that I enjoy the ones that tell a story from the writer's past, or the past of their relatives.  I enjoy less the essays that try to interpret and comment upon societal changes.  This was true with this book's essays, too.  I especially enjoyed the essays by Joseph Ranallo, Angela Long, Darlene Madott, and Glenn Carley.

Mr. Carley married a first-generation Italian-Canadian, and found himself welcomed into her family with open arms.  He says of Italian-Canadians:

I have worked along-side your men and you women and I love them, the way they loved me, not so much with the words but through the eyes into my eyes, through the gifts of paradise, through your ministry of presence.  ...  I have been grafted by large hands and I took and I took and I grew.

I also found interesting the essay that stated that innovation in Italian cuisine comes not from within Italy, which as become food-stagnant, but from Italophiles around the world.

 

 

Because there is no plot-line to join the essays together, I found my interest was sustained best when I savored the essays in small batches, like dishes served at a long Italian wedding dinner. 

But why do we enjoy reading about other people's memories and lives?  I suspect it is because they may spark our own long lost memories, and bring joy.  They may help explain a friend or relative who grew up in a culture similar to the essayists'.  They may point out the common human experiences that bind all of us together, no matter what our background.  These essays do just that!

 

 

From the book's description:

The persistence of misconceptions about Italian-Canadian food culture raises many questions for us.  Are we gluttonous, inebriate and too loud?  Do we force-feed guests?  Are we in fact food-obsessed?  How many grains of truth can a stereotype hold?  We had to know, so we asked articulate and thoughtful Italian-Canadian writers and simpatico friends from British Columbia to Newfoundland.

The responses were surprising, thoughtful, entertaining and often touching, making my co-editor, Delia De Santis, and I very glad we asked, as every piece which streamed over the internet's ether was a gift and a joy to read.  And the result is Italian Canadians at Table, a passionate literary feast of poetry and prose.

Italian Canadians at Table is published by Guernica, in a very attractive paperback and e-book edition.  

Direct link to the book's page at the Guernica website

Here is a direct link to the book at Amazon.com:

Never been to Canada?  Here's a two minute video postcard of the country:

This review is by Candida Martinelli, of Candida Martinelli's Italophile Site, and the author of the cozy-murder-mystery novel AN EXTRA VIRGIN PRESSING MURDER, and the young-adult/adult mystery novel series THE VIOLET STRANGE MYSTERIES the first book of which is VIOLET'S PROBLEM.

The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio

In his 62 years (b.1313-d.1375), Giovanni Boccaccio was a prolific poet and storyteller in Latin and Italian.  He was a close friend of the scholar/poet Petrarch, and a trusted emissary of the rulers of his day.  Boccaccio lived at various times in Naples, Florence, Venice, and Paris, where he was actually born to his French mother as the illegitimate son of a Tuscan merchant.  His father’s attempts to make him a merchant, and then a canon failed, and he finally found his own way as a scholar, poet and writer of tales.

It wasn’t until his middle-age that he wrote the work still read and enjoyed today, The Decameron.  The structure of the collection of often bawdy short stories explains the title:  the book is divided into ten days during which each member of a group of ten people tells one tale, so each day’s tales equal ten.  Each day, the group is given a theme by one of the storytellers to which their stories must comply, such as infidelity, honor, avarice.  

It was an outbreak of the plague in 1348 in Florence that prompted Boccaccio to finally write the work for which he had long been collecting material.  The group of ten are actually in Fiesole above Florence to escape the plague, and tell the stories to provide amusement during their exile.

Like the poet Petrarch with his Laura, and poet Dante with his Beatrice, Boccaccio had his Fiammetta, his poetical inspiration, and in his case, his lover and introduction into court society.  He featured her in many of his works, including The Decameron.

Fiammetta is one of the storytellers, and at the end of the Fourth Day he describes her receiving the laurel wreath, the kingly symbol given to the person who will decide the next day’s theme.  His description of her is most likely how Boccaccio lovingly saw her, although I’m not too sure I’d like to be said to have “eyes in her head that matched those of a peregrine falcon”.

It reads in part:

Fiammetta, whose wavy tresses fell in a flood of gold over her white and delicate shoulders, whose softly rounded face was all radiant with the very tints of the white lily blended with the red of the rose, who carried two eyes in her head that matched those of a peregrine falcon... 

The Decameron was one of the earliest printed books, the first edition coming out of Venice in 1471.  Before it was printed, people paid to have it copied and illustrated for their private libraries. 

But early editions of the book are a rare find today, because most were burned in Florence’s main square by the radical reform-mined preacher Savonarola in 1497, about a year before he himself was burned there for heresy, actually, for being a big pain in the behind to the rulers of Florence and to the clergy.  

Early English translations of The Decameron were edited of their bawdiness, just as early editions of A Thousand and One Nights was stripped of its licentiousness in early translations.  Only later did faithful translations appear.  But even before it was translated into English, English writers Chaucer and Shakespeare borrowed generously from the work.

Here is a quote about a woman defending herself against a charge of cheating on her husband, at which she was caught in the act:

...ask my husband if I ever denied him, but did not rather accord him, when and so often as he craved it, complete enjoyment of myself.

Whereto Rinaldo, without awaiting the Podesta's question, answered that assuredly the lady had always granted him all that he had asked of her for his gratification.

"Then," promptly continued the lady, "if he has always had of me as much as sufficed for his solace, what was I or am I to do with the surplus?  Am I to cast it to the dogs?  Is it not much better to bestow it on a gentleman who loves me more dearly than himself, than to suffer it to come to nought or worse?

For more about the villa that was the location of the storytelling, visit Italophiles.com (Candida Martinelli's Italophile Site), my website about Italian culture.  The Boccaccio page has lots of info and images.

Free e-books of The Decameron are available from Project Gutenberg, the grand-daddy of all free e-book websites.

Direct links to The Decameron free e-books

Paperback editions of The Decameron, as well as the bawdy 1970s film, are available via Amazon.com.

This review is by Candida Martinelli, of Candida Martinelli's Italophile Site, and the author of the cozy-murder-mystery novel AN EXTRA VIRGIN PRESSING MURDER, and the young-adult/adult mystery novel series THE VIOLET STRANGE MYSTERIES the first book of which is VIOLET'S PROBLEM.