Books for the (virtual) Italian holiday
Beaches, mountains and cities with the famous 'dolce far niente' feeling: Italy has always been a place of longing for Germans, especially in the summer months. For your holiday reading we have put together a selection of books that have recently been published and translated from Italian into German (titles given in English for better reading – please see link to full article for the title in German).
Andrea Camilleri is back with two new stories about Commissario Montalbano: While in The Cook of the Halcyon (original title: Il cuoco dell’Alcyon) a mysterious sailing yacht and a playboy are at the centre of the investigation, in Rounding the Mark (original title Il Giro di Boa)a corpse drifts off the Sicilian coast and leads to serious political entanglements.
Susanna Tamaro's new novel A great love story (original title: Una grande storia d’amore) is also set at the seaside, or to be more precise, on the sea itself: during a ship trip from Venice to Piraeus, young high school graduate Edith and captain Andrea meet and fall in love. How they cross paths, loose each other and find back again despite several strokes of fate is told in Tamaro’s own beautiful and poetic language. Read it ahead of the meeting with Susanna Tamaro in Frankfurt in October.
A masterpiece of storytelling, Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron, has been recently republished by Reclam in a bibliophile edition, with woodcuts from the Venetian edition of 1492. In a country house near Florence during the plague epidemic, seven young women and three young men tell each other ten stories over ten days – stories which have lost none of their sensuality even today.
Not a translation, but a contemporary reinterpretation of the Italian Dolce Vita is Patrizia di Stefano’s book Ciao Italia! In the tradition of the famous travel reports by Goethe, Lord Byron or Montaigne, she takes the reader to known and less known Italian places of longing, presenting them in a completely new and female perspective.
Also many other newly published works and translations tell of Italian landscapes: from Venice to Naples, from rural Abruzzo in the 1950s to a Milan café in the summer of 2020. Come with us on the (virtual) journey!