Based on newly opened Vatican archives, a groundbreaking, explosive, and riveting book about Pope Pius XII and his actions during World War II, including how he responded to the Holocaust, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Pope and Mussolini
Shadow Plays explores popular forms of entertainment used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to transport viewers to a new world, foreshadowing present-day virtual, augmented, and extended reality experiences (VR, AR, and XR). Typically studied as part of the prehistory of cinema or the archaeology of media, analog technologies such as the mondo nuovo or cosmorama, the magic lantern, the moving panorama, and the stereoscope evoked shadow copies of our world long before the advent of digital technologies and exercised a powerful pull on minds and imaginations.
Through six case histories and eight interactive simulations, Massimo Riva explores themes of virtual travel, social surveillance, and utopian imagination, shedding light on illustrious or, in some instances, forgotten figures and inventions from Italy’s past. Arguing for the continuity of experience and imagination, Riva adopts the term virtual realism, an experience marked by the virtualization of the real and the realization of the virtual. At a time when the gap between simulations and “real” experiences is getting ever smaller, a cultural-historical exploration of the prehistory of virtual reality can help us better understand the present in light of the past while exploring the past using the tools forged in the present.
Evelyn Lincoln's contribution to this volume, edited by Pamela M. Jones, Barbara Wisch, and Simon Ditchfield, focuses on networks of printers and publishers in Rome, during an era of striking renewal: demographic, architectural, intellectual, and artistic.
The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Pope and Mussolini tells the story of the bloody revolution that stripped the pope of political power and signaled the birth of modern Europe. “Kertzer’s brilliant treatment of the crisis in the papacy between 1846 and 1850 reads like a thriller. All the characters, from the poor of Rome to the king of Naples, stand out with a vividness that testifies to his mastery of prose.”—The New York Review of Books
In his introductory essay to the Catalog of the exhibition he co-curated, held at Palazzo Angeli in Padua, Italy, 21 December 2018 - 3 March 2019, Massimo Riva focuses on stereoscopic journeys to Italy showing how they played a prominent role in the marketing of virtual mass tourism at the turn of the twentieth century.
A compelling biographical work on Gaetano Salvemini (1873 - 1957), one of the most influential Italian intellectuals of his generation. The book reconstructs Salvemini’s private life from the loss of his family in the Messina earthquake of 1908 to 1946, when fascism, the World War, and his stepson’s execution for collaborationism with the Nazis, ruined his second family as well.
This article is a first foray into a new book project entitled "Grounds for Reclamation: Fascism, Postfascism, and the Question of Consent." It investigates the ways in which fascist "ruralizing" policies of land reclamation were portrayed by the regime itself, as also today by political forces interested in reclaiming fascism itself.
Accounting for Affection examines the multifaceted nature of early modern motherhood by focusing on the ideas and strategies of Roman aristocratic mothers during familial conflict. Illuminating new approaches to the maternal and the familial employed by such women, it demonstrates how such interventions gained increasing favor in early modern Rome.
The notes by Ronald L. Martinez and Robert M. Durling to this third volume of their edition of Dante's masterpiece not only illuminate the Paradiso but stress the links among all three volumes of the Commedia, providing the comprehensive historical, political, biblical, and theological contexts that enrich the reader's understanding of the poem.
Trame: A Contemporary Italian Reader brings together short stories, poems, interviews, excerpts from movie scripts and novels, and other works by 33 renowned authors.