PhotoBooks Italy

Roman in origin, the villa evolved from serving as a rural and farming center to a stately country residence. Over time the villa's agricultural function became secondary to a new ideal-a place for intellectual leisure and healthy country living. As a result, the new dwelling had to reflect a cultivated design as did its landscaping. Villas were no longer the work of unskilled laborers but of gifted architects, the best known of which is Andrea Palladio, whose style remains influential today.

In this fascinating volume, the author describes and illustrates 250 of the most remarkable villas from the 600-year-old tradition, some well-known houses, others generally overlooked. Presented here are panoramas and details of grand country villas and magnificent suburban estates, each with its own charm and history, and each of which contributes to a style that is still imitated in our century. The illustrations and text by Ovidio Guaita, representing decades of work, are grouped by region, north to south. Enriching the coverage, each chapter includes a profile of a personality-architect, builder, artist, or patron-whose work had a lasting influence on the culture of the villa. Supplementing the color photographs of exteriors and interiors are architectural drawings of houses and maps. The appendices offer a glossary, a bibliography, and a listing of villas that may be visited. This splendid book should be of great appeal to those interested in architecture, art history, and travel. Other Details: 400 illustrations, 300 in full color.

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An impressionist, sensuous celebration of Italy via stunning and dreamy handmade Polaroid transfers of muted colors and soft lines.

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Introduction by Giorgio Armani. Essays by Michelangelo Sabatino and Luigi Ballarini. Boasting to everyone that his forum would be grander than the Coliseum, Mussolini created the Stadio dei Marmi, or Stadium of Statues, an arena built outside Rome for the 1944 Olympic Games that were postponed by World War II. Believing a fascist state required the top level of physical fitness, II Duce provided inspiration for his nation in the form of monumental art, commissioning sculptors from all over the country to creat sixty Herculean statues of white marble to be put atop six-foot pedestals surrounding the stadium. The statues, based on figures from Italian war memorials, embodied the glorification of the athlete and the mannered heroism of the soldier. Startingly erotic and poetic, each statue stands twelve feet tall, nude but for the occasional headband or sandals. So blatant was their sexual presence that the statues later provoked furtive attempts at "decency" involving fig leaves and loincloths. Once relegated to the category of political kitsch, these statues have, in recent times, been re-evaluated and are being recognized as objects of beauty and merit. "The Foro Italico...sustains a guileless, perhaps unique, male eroticism which at odds with the grandiloquent intentions of its planner and creators in Mussolini's fascist regime," explains George Mott, who first glimpsed the statues in 1962 and photographed them twenty years later. His black-and-white and color images of the statues have been sought by collectors in Europe and America, and have been used repeatedly by fashion designers and art directors. In Foro Italico, for the first time, these photographs are being shown collectively, exquisitely reproduced in a remarkable, deluxe, slip-cased edition which includes an introduction by Giorgio Armani, himself a connoisseur of 1930s art and architecture.

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This book guides the first-time visitor to Florence through this cultural treasure trove and sheds light on the beauty and importance of the masterpieces on display. For those familiar with Florence, the volume shows an unfamiliar face of an old friend, presenting some of the city’s famous monuments and palaces in a new and distinctive manner, with a blend of stunning photography and a focus on the hidden, everyday details that somehow capture the very spirit of the place. The result is a vivid, living portrait of this unique and ancient city.

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Any scene shot in black and white contains a certain element of mystery and, often, nostalgia. But black and white hardly begins to describe the evocative tones of Linda Butler's work, which ranges from silvery blue to pale gold to rich velvet black. Whether a far-reaching photo of a landscape or an intimate portrait of a crypt, Butler's works are of mesmerizing composition; here a curtain moves in a gentle gust, there a cross of sunlight burns through a cathedral door, and everywhere the "presence of the past vibrates in the air." This series of landscapes and still lifes comprises an ode to Italy's ancestors. Light, shadow, and antiquity become the main characters: "No people appear in Butler's photographs, but their actuality as ghost presences who once built and tended the derelict palazzos ... can be felt on every page." Over the course of several years, Butler visited many of the regions of Italy--Umbria, Sicily, the Veneto, and Liguria to name a few--to amass this breathtaking collection, which will awe and delight photography fans and Italy aficionados alike. --Jhana Bach

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An Eye for the City traces a brief history of contemporary Italian photography which came of age during the post World War II years, at the same time that the cities that are documented were starting to be rebuilt. By the early 1950s a new generation of Italian photographers such as Ugo Mulas and Giorgio Avigdor began photographing the new cities with tough, high-contrast pictures in the wake of such "neo-Realist" movies as The Bicycle Thief and Miracle in Milan.

In the following decades Italian photographers such as Mimmo Jodice, Gabriele Basilico, Vincenzo Castella, Guido Guidi and later Paola de Pietri and Walter Niedermayr began traveling within the urban fabric of cities reproducing the gaze of anonymous citizens and ordinary passersby living their everyday urban life. An Eye for the City includes essays in English and Italian by photohistorian Antonella Russo, Deborah Bershad, Executive Director, Art Commission of the City of New York, and Bernardo Secchi, professor of Urban Studies at the University of Venezia, Italy.

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In the early 1960s, internationally acclaimed photographer Bruno Barbey sought to capture with his camera the spirit of Italy. Here, his endearing modern commedia dell'arte of beggars, priests, nuns, carabinieri, prostitutes, and mafiosi— archetypal figures whose exotic charms helped to make the films of Pasolini, Visconti, and Fellini so popular—join with the subtle pen of best-selling novelist and essayist Tahar Ben Jelloun to reveal the essence of Italy in that period. The result is an evocative word-and-picture portrayal of the Italians.

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