Joseph Luzzi

Cari Amici / Dear Friends,

Grazie mille to all of you who are reading, discussing, and sharing your thoughts about My Two Italies - which was chosen as a New York Times Book Review "Editors' Choice."

It's my pleasure to share with you a new VIDEO, some REVIEWS, an EXCERPT, and news about my BOOK TOUR and BLOG. Please share with friends...

and Auguri di Buone Feste / Happiest of Holidays!

VIDEO: an interview with Yolanda Luzzi - a "star" of MY TWO ITALIES...

SELECTED REVIEWS:

"An Elegant, Thoughtful Exploration Of Life In 'Two Italies.' " - Mark Rotella, NPR. More here.

"My Two Italies, a brilliant tour de force that is part memoir, part cultural criticism and part paean to the magical city of Florence." - Arlice Davenport, The Wichita Eagle. More here.

EXCERPT:

A Florentine Courtship - "The city resisted my overtures but opened my mind and my heart" (published in The Chronicle of Higher Education). More here.

Information about my BOOK TOUR and BLOG, including a recent piece on the magical pull of old family photos...

TO ORDER:

"My Two Italies" is available at amazon.com, Barnes&Noble, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and your local bookstore. You can get a signed copy from my local bookshop, fantastic Oblong Books - they will ship to you anywhere.

Description of
My Two Italies

The child of Italian immigrants and an award-winning scholar of Italian literature, in My Two Italies Joseph Luzzi straddles these two perspectives to link his family's dramatic story to Italy's north-south divide, its quest for a unifying language, and its passion for art, food, and family.

From his Calabrian father's time as a military internee in Nazi Germany-where he had a love affair with a local Bavarian woman-to his adventures amid the Renaissance splendor of Florence, Luzzi creates a deeply personal portrait of Italy that leaps past facile clich�s about Mafia madness and Tuscan sun therapy.

With topics ranging from the pervasive force of Dante's poetry to the meteoric rise of Silvio Berlusconi, Luzzi presents the Italians in all their glory and squalor, relating the problems that plague Italy today to the country's ancient roots. He shares how his "two Italies"-the earthy southern Italian world of his immigrant childhood and the refined "northern" Italian realm of his professional life-join and clash in unexpected ways that continue to enchant the many millions who are either connected to Italy by ancestry or bound to it by love.

PRAISE FOR MY TWO ITALIES

"My Two Italies deals with the enduring disconnect between the ideal Italy that is admired as a center of civilization, and the hardship and hardness of the emigrant experience. Both come vividly alive in Luzzi's heartfelt and illuminating book."
     -Gay Talese, author of Unto the Sons

"Joseph Luzzi has written a funny and often moving family history that opens onto wider vistas that he knows and loves equally well-the Italian cultural and political landscape from Dante to Silvio Berlusconi. Full of charm and insight, but admirably frank and unsentimental, My Two Italies should be required reading on all flights to Italy."
     -Ross King, author of Leonardo and the Last Supper

About Joseph Luzzi

josephluzzi.com

Joseph Luzzi, the first American-born child in his Italian family, holds a doctorate from Yale and is a professor of Italian at Bard. He is the author of Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy, which won the Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies from the Modern Language Association, and A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film.

An active critic, his essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Bookforum, and The Times Literary Supplement. He is the author of the audio courses In Michelangelo's Shadow: The Mystery of Modern Italy, The Blessed Lens: A History of Italian Cinema, and The Art of Reading.

His honors include an essay award from the Dante Society of America, a teaching prize from Yale, and a fellowship from the National Humanities Center. Luzzi lectures widely on Italy, literature, art, and film. Visit him online at www.JosephLuzzi.com, and follow him on Twitter at @LuzziJoseph.

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