Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

The Stone Boudoir: Travels through the Hidden Villages of Sicily

The Stone Boudoir: Travels through the Hidden Villages of Sicily

by Teri Maggio

From the acclaimed author of Mattanza , a remarkable collection of intertwined stories about the unknown hill towns and villages of Sicily. In this sparkling book, Theresa Maggio takes us on a journey in search of Sicily's most remote and least explored mountain towns. Using her grandparents' ancestral village of Santa Margherita Belice as her base camp, she pores over old maps to plot her adventure, selecting... (more)

Lucia, Lucia: A Novel

by Adriana Trigiani

It is 1950 in glittering, vibrant New York City. Lucia Sartori is the beautiful twenty-five-year-old daughter of a prosperous Italian grocer in Greenwich Village. The postwar boom is ripe with opportunities for talented girls with ambition, and Lucia becomes an apprentice to an up-and-coming designer at chic B. Altman’s department store on Fifth Avenue. Engaged to her childhood sweetheart, the steadfast Dante... (more)

Unto the Sons

by Gay Talese

"An Italian ROOTS." The Washington Post Book World At long last, Gay Talese, one of America's greatest living authors, employs his prodigious storytelling gifts to tell the saga of his own family's emigration to America from Italy in the years preceding World War II. Ultimately it is the story of all immigrant families and the hope and sacrifice that took them from the familiarity of the old world into the... (more)

Unto the Daughters: The Legacy of an Honor Killing in a Sicilian-American Family

Unto the Daughters: The Legacy of an Honor Killing in a Sicilian-American Family

by Karen Tintori

Karen Tintori thought she knew her family tree. Her grandmother Josie had emigrated from Sicily with her parents at the turn of the century. They settled in Detroit, and with Josie’s nine siblings, worked to create a home for themselves away from the poverty and servitude of the old country. Their descendants were proud Italian-Americans. But Josie had a sister nobody spoke of. Her name was Frances, and at age... (more)

The Gadfly

by E. L. Voynich

Novel about the struggles of an international activist in Italy, first published in 1897.

Italian Woman

by Jean Plaidy

The spell of Sicily,: The garden of the Mediterranean,W. S Monroe

The spell of Sicily,: The garden of the Mediterranean,

by W. S Monroe

The Villa in Italy

by Elizabeth Edmondson

Sicily

by Guy de Maupassant

Guy de Maupassant, the master of the nineteenth-century French short story, visited Sicily in the spring of 1885 and wrote his travel memoir as a tribute to the art, architecture, people and landscape of this Mediterranean island. He provides a vivid account of this strange and divine museum of architecture, where Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, and Norman influences combine to produce monuments of beauty and a... (more)

The Monster of Florence

by Douglas Preston, Mario Spezi

In the nonfiction tradition of John Berendt ("Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil") and Erik Larson ("The Devil in the White City"), New York Times bestselling author Douglas Preston presents a gripping account of crime and punishment in the lush hills surrounding Florence , Italy . In 2000, Douglas Preston fulfilled a dream to move his family to Italy. Then he discovered that the olive grove in front... (more)

That Summer in Sicily: A Love Story

by Marlena De Blasi

"From de Blasi ( The Lady in the Palazzo , 2007, etc.), a fragrant tale of life and love in the mountains of Sicily.Shortly after the Venetian interlude she luxuriously captured in A Thousand Days in Venice (2002), the author accepted an assignment to write a magazine article on the interior regions of Sicily. Like many other journalists, she was met by silence from the wary Sicilians. She was about to retire to... (more)

Maria: The Life Story of a World War II Italian Bride

Maria: The Life Story of a World War II Italian Bride

by Maria Leonardi-Lamorte

Maria is a real life drama that begins in old world Italy, in the midst of World War II. Based on the true story of a World War II war bride this page-turning book takes you for a ride through the challenges of real life. As an Italian woman, Maria had to learn to be strong very quickly. The German occupation was taking its toll on her beautiful native hometown of Napes. Thankfully the United States brought... (more)

Passion on the Vine: A Memoir of Food, Wine, and Family in the Heart of Italy

Passion on the Vine: A Memoir of Food, Wine, and Family in the Heart of Italy

by Sergio Esposito

As a young child in Naples, Italy, Sergio Esposito sat at his kitchen table observing the daily ritual of his large, loud family bonding over fresh local dishes and simple country wines. While devouring the rich bufala mozzarella, still sopping with milk and salt, and the platters of fresh prosciutto, sliced so thin he could see through it, he absorbed the profound relationship of food, wine, and family in... (more)

The Borgias and Their Enemies: 1431-1519

The Borgias and Their Enemies: 1431-1519

by Christopher Hibbert

The first major biography of the Borgias in thirty years, Christopher Hibbert's latest history brings the family and the world they lived in—the glittering Rome of the Italian Renaissance—to life. The name Borgia is synonymous with the corruption, nepotism, and greed that were rife in Renaissance Italy. The powerful, voracious Rodrigo Borgia, better known to history as Pope Alexander VI, was the central figure... (more)

Sweet Honey, Bitter Lemons

by Matthew Fort

'Sicily struck me then as the most fascinating place I had ever visited. I didn't change that opinion over the intervening years, no matter where I travelled. I meant to go back. Time and again I made plans. Time and again I was thwarted.'At the age of twenty-six Matthew Fort first visited the island of Sicily. He and his brother arrived in 1973 expecting sun, sea and good food, but they were totally unprepared... (more)

Very Valentine: A Novel

by Adriana Trigiani

Meet the Roncalli and Angelini families, a vibrant cast of colorful characters who navigate tricky family dynamics with hilarity and brio, from magical Manhattan to the picturesque hills of bella Italia. Very Valentine is the first novel in a trilogy and is sure to be the new favorite of Trigiani's millions of fans around the world. In this luscious, contemporary family saga, the Angelini Shoe Company,... (more)

That Summer in Sicily a Love StoryMarlena De Blasi

That Summer in Sicily a Love Story

by Marlena De Blasi

The Glassblower of Murano

by Marina Fiorato

Venice, 1681. Glassblowing is the lifeblood of the Republic, and Venetian mirrors are more precious than gold. Jealously guarded by the murderous Council of Ten, the glassblowers of Murano are virtually imprisoned on their island in the lagoon. But the greatest of the artists, Corradino Manin, sells his methods and his soul to the Sun King, Louis XIV of France, to protect his secret daughter. In the present day... (more)

A Summer in Sicily

by G. C. Dallas

Take a famous, but stressed, woman--abstract painter from Washington DC; an infatuated sculptor from NY with a beautiful, not so dumb, model. Add a stingy, but elegant professor; a gallery owner with an adolescent daughter and an alcoholic ex-wife and put all these Americans in a small town one summer in Sicily. Not forgetting either: a bureaucrat from Rome; a crack Sicilian photographer; an Italian sculptor,... (more)

Siciliana: Studies on the Sicilian Ethos (Sicilian Studies, . 12.)

Siciliana: Studies on the Sicilian Ethos (Sicilian Studies, . 12.)

by Gaetano Cipolla

This collection of essays expands on Gaetano Cipolla's successful booklet entitled "What Makes a Sicilian?" Its contents include "The Jews in Sicily", "The Arabs in Sicily" "Sicily and Greece", "Is Sicilian a Language or a Dialect?" as well as chapters on Sicilian literature.

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: sicily/italy

by Teri Maggio

by Adriana Trigiani

by Gay Talese

by Karen Tintori

by E. L. Voynich

by Jean Plaidy

by W. S Monroe

by Elizabeth Edmondson

by Guy de Maupassant

by Douglas Preston, Mario Spezi

by Marlena De Blasi

by Maria Leonardi-Lamorte

by Sergio Esposito

by Christopher Hibbert

by Matthew Fort

by Adriana Trigiani

by Marlena De Blasi

by Marina Fiorato

by G. C. Dallas

by Gaetano Cipolla