Bøger i The Italian List - (Seagull Titles - CHUP) serien

A translation of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's work, in which the author notes that academic research has lingered on the "pagan goddess," while the concept of "elemental spirit," ignored by scholars, is vital to the history of iconography.

When Life in Peactime opens, on May 29, 2015, engineer Ivo Brandani is sixty-nine years old. He's disillusioned and angry--but morbidly attached to life. As he makes a day-long trip home from his job in Sharm el Sheik reconstructing the coral reefs of the Red Sea using synthetics, he reflects on both the brief time he sees remaining ahead and on everything that has happened already in his life to which he can never quite resign himself. We see his slow bureaucratic trudge as a civil servant, long summer vacations on a Greek island, his twisted relationship with his first boss, the turmoil and panic attacks he faced during the student uprisings in 1968 that pushed him away from philosophy and into engineering, and his fearful childhood as a postwar evacuee. A close-up portrait of an ordinary existence, Life in Peacetime offers a new look at the postwar era in Italy and the fundamental contradictions of a secure, middle-class life.

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is the rare writer whose ideas and works have a broad appeal across many fields. In March 2009, Agamben was invited to speak in Paris' Notre-Dame Cathedral in the presence of the bishop of Paris and a number of other high-ranking church officials. This title presents this speech.

Widely considered to be among the most important Italian poets of the twentieth century, Sandro Penna was born and raised in Perugia but spent most of his life in Rome. Openly gay, Penna wrote verses celebrating homosexual love with lyrical elegance. His writing alternates between whimsy and melancholia, but it is always full of light. Juggling traditional Italian prosody and subject matter with their gritty urban opposites in taut, highly concentrated poems, Penna‿s lyrics revel in love and the eruption of Eros together with the extraordinary that can be found within simple everyday life. There is something ancient in Penna‿s poetry, and something Etruscan or Greek about the poems, though the landscape is most often of Rome: sensual yet severe, sinuous yet solid, inscrutable, intangible, and languorous, with a Sphinx-like and sun-soaked smile. Penna‿s city is eternal‿a mythically decadent Rome that brings to mind Paris or Alexandria. And though the echoes resound‿from Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Baudelaire to Leopardi, D‿Annunzio, and Cavafy‿the voice is always undeniably and wonderfully Penna‿s own. Â