History’s oldest industry conducts its business in broad daylight on Talpretta—until Lucia di Vigilanti, the most famous madam in the civilized galaxy, finds herself under the scrutiny of a government that will stop at nothing before it destroys all free enterprise. When the sexual labor union launches an assault on the Bordello della Libertà, Lucia has no choice but to fight back, to defend the livelihood of her hard-working girls. The second installment of Aethertales, the story of Bordello della Libertà is one of capitalism under siege, and of the surrender of personal choice at gunpoint, for the sake of those whose only choice is to take from others and give nothing in return.
""The Politics of Princely Entertainment explores the transformations in the politics of entertainment of the Italian aristocratic classes during the second half of the seventeenth century, at a time in which profound social and cultural shifts influenced the production and consumption of music in radical ways. The emergence of commercial theaters in the 1630s in Venice and the great appeal that opera began to have on a large and international audience required the aristocracy to take up a new role within the complex network of agents responsible for the production not only of opera but of music in general. The increasing competition between commercial opera theaters, ruling courts, aristocratic families and religious institutions and the consequent professionalization of roles that previously relied solely on patronage meant that singers, poets and composers acquired unprecedented negotiating power. This books explores these questions following the journeys and ventures of two of the most prominent patrons in seventeenth-century Italy, Prince Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna and his wife Maria Mancini. During the thirty years under exam, 1659-1689, the Colonna were the most influential and active agents in the musical life of Rome: they sponsored an unprecedented number of operas, serenatas, oratorios, public ceremonies and carnival parades while supporting the careers of the most prominent composers, librettists, musicians and singers of the time. Following Prince Colonna and his wife through their personal and institutional travels to Venice, Spain, as Viceroyalties of the Kingdom of Aragon, and later Naples, this book traces the journeys not only of scores and librettos, but also of the singers, composers and librettists whose art reached these far away corners of Europe, changing and transforming to serve diverse social and political purposes.""--
This book of essays brings together international scholars working on the literary, visual, musical, and theatrical representations and reception of Hortense Mancini, Duchess Mazarin, an early modern woman whose literal—geographical—“border crossings” serve here as the starting point for an investigation of her and others’ elisions and transgressions of borders of all kinds. The authors lay out strategies for exploring the ways in which she crossed geographical, gendered, cultural, and—in scholarly terms—disciplinary boundaries, and in so doing, consider how an investigation of those border crossings can enhance our understanding of early modern cultural formation. The new work presented here by some of the most distinguished junior and senior scholars working today in the fields of history, art history, literary history, the history of theater, and the history of music promises to stimulate a broader scholarly discussion about early modern border-crossing and women’s places in the early modern period in general.
An analysis of the confinement experience in Italian narrative between 1930 and 1960, covering the last years of Fascism. Not limiting herself to prisons, Nerenberg also explores military barracks, convents, and brothels as carceral homologues.
Unique memoir of a Canadian serving in a German armored division What it was like to fight in a tank on the Eastern Front Details on the battlefield performance of the Panzer IV tank Six months before World War II erupted in 1939, Bruno Friesen was sent to Germany by his father in hopes of a better life. Friesen was drafted into the Wehrmacht three years later and ended up in the 7th Panzer Division. Serving as a gunner in a Panzer IV tank and then a Jagdpanzer IV tank destroyer, Friesen experienced intense combat against the Soviets in Romania, Lithuania, and West Prussia.
Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette, 1948) is unarguably one of the most important films in the history of cinema. It is also one of the most beguiling, moving and (apparently) simple pieces of narrative ever made. The film tells the story of one man and his son, as they search fruitlessly through the streets of Rome for his stolen bicycle; the bicycle which had offered the possibility of escape from the poverty and humiliation of long-term unemployment. One of a cluster of extraordinary films to come out of post-war, post-Fascist Italy - loosely labelled 'neorealist' – Bicycle Thieves won an Oscar in 1949, topped the first Sight and Sound poll of the best films of all time in 1952 and has been hugely influential throughout world cinema ever since. It remains a necessary point of reference for any cinematic engagement with the labyrinthine experience of the modern city, the travails of poverty in the contemporary world, the complex bond between fathers and sons, and the capacity of the camera to capture something like the essence of all of these. Robert S. C. Gordon's BFI Film Classics volume shows how Bicycle Thieves is ripe for re-viewing, for rescuing from its worthy status as a neorealist 'classic'. It looks at the film's drawn-out planning and production history, the vibrant and riven context in which it was made, and the dynamic geography, geometry and sociology of the film that resulted. ROBERT S. C. GORDON is Reader in Modern Italian Culture, Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge, UK.
