Italia: Civilta e Cultura offers a general, comprehensive description of historical and cultural development on the Italian peninsula. This project was developed to provide students and professors with an essential, flexible and easy-to-read reference book about Italian civilization and cultural studies, also appropriate for cinema and Italian literature classes.

Italia: Civilta e Cultura offers a comprehensive description of historical and cultural development on the Italian peninsula. This project was developed to provide students and professors with a flexible and easy-to-read reference book about Italian civilization and cultural studies, also appropriate for cinema and Italian literature classes. This text is intended for students pursuing a minor or a major in Italian studies and serves as an important learning tool with its all-inclusive vision of Italy. Each chapter includes thematic itineraries to promote active class discussion and textual comprehension check-questions to guide students through the reading and understanding of the subject matter.

This rigorously compiled A-Z volume offers rich, readable coverage of the diverse forms of post-1945 Italian culture. With over 900 entries by international contributors, this volume is genuinely interdisciplinary in character, treating traditional political, economic, and legal concerns, with a particular emphasis on neglected areas of popular culture. Entries range from short definitions, histories or biographies to longer overviews covering themes, movements, institutions and personalities, from advertising to fascism, and Pirelli to Zeffirelli. The Encyclopedia aims to inform and inspire both teachers and students in the following fields: *Italian language and literature *Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences *European Studies *Media and Cultural Studies *Business and Management *Art and Design It is extensively cross-referenced, has a thematic contents list and suggestions for further reading.

Investigating the interrelationships between orality and writing in elite and popular textual culture in early modern Italy, this volume shows how the spoken or sung word on the one hand, and manuscript or print on the other hand, could have interdependent or complementary roles to play in the creation and circulation of texts. The first part of the book centres on performances, ranging from realizations of written texts to improvisations or semi-improvisations that might draw on written sources and might later be committed to paper. Case studies examine the poems sung in the piazza that narrated contemporary warfare, commedia dell'arte scenarios, and the performative representation of the diverse spoken languages of Italy. The second group of essays studies the influence of speech on the written word and reveals that, as fourteenth-century Tuscan became accepted as a literary standard, contemporary non-standard spoken languages were seen to possess an immediacy that made them an effective resource within certain kinds of written communication. The third part considers the roles of orality in the worlds of the learned and of learning. The book as a whole demonstrates that the borderline between orality and writing was highly permeable and that the culture of the period, with its continued reliance on orality alongside writing, was often hybrid in nature.

When Mona Lisa smiled enigmatically from the cover of the Italian magazine Epoca in 1957, she gazed out at more than three million readers. As Emma Barron argues, her appearance on the cover is emblematic of the distinctive ways that high culture was integrated into Italy’s mass culture boom in the 1950s and 1960s, a period when popular appropriations of literature, fine art and music became a part of the rapidly changing modern Italian identity. Popular magazines ran weekly illustrated adaptations of literary classics. Television brought opera from the opera house into the homes of millions. Readers wrote to intellectuals and artists such as Alberto Moravia, Thomas Mann and Salvatore Quasimodo by the thousands with questions about literature and self-education. Drawing upon new archival material on the demographics of television audiences and magazine readers, this book is an engaging account of how the Italian people took possession of high culture and transformed the modern Italian identity.

The late and turbulent transition from a largely rural and peasant society to a modern urban state involved the crisis of rooted popular traditions and the emergence of mass cultural forms. As a result, Italy, once the centre of a cultural world, has increasingly found itself on the periphery of an American media empire and serious questions of cultural identity have been raised. The Italian case is further significant on account of the theoretical and political problems it has posed. As well as dealing with these and related topics, the book examines current tendencies, such as the rapid multiplication of sub-cultures and the crisis of 'mass' forms. Each chapter is written by a specialist in the field. Although the essays normally deal with specific problems, they also highlight both the historical context and more general considerations within their sphere of interest.

Exploring theatre and opera, architecture and urban planning, the medieval revival and the rediscovery of the Etruscan and Roman past, this book analyzes Italians' changing relationship to their new nation state and the monarchy, class conflicts, and the emergence of new belief systems and of scientific responses to the experience of modernity.