“Luzzi honestly grapples with profound questions about being a man and father in his very literary and very personal work.”
—Publishers Weekly
My New Book!
Botticelli’s Secret
The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance
Memoirs
My Two Italies
A Personal and Cultural History
In a Dark Wood
What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love
Scholarship
Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy
A Cinema of Poetry
Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film
Audio Books
The Art of Reading
The Blessed Lens
A History of Italian Cinema
In Michelangelo’s Shadow
The Mystery of Modern Italy
Translations
Il romanticismo italiano e l’Europa
Fantasia e realtà nell'immaginario occidentale
Oltre la selva oscura
Come Dante mi ha fatto ritrovare la luce della vita
In einem dunklen Walde
Wie Dante mir einen Weg aus meiner Trauer wies
In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love
In the aftermath of a heartbreaking tragedy, a scholar and writer uses Dante’s Divine Comedy to shepherd him through the dark wood of grief and mourning—a rich and emotionally resonant memoir of suffering, hope, love, and the power of literature to inspire and heal the most devastating loss.
More about this BookMy Two Italies: A Personal and Cultural History
The child of Italian immigrants and an award-winning scholar of Italian literature, Joseph Luzzi straddles these two perspectives in My Two Italies to link his family’s dramatic story to Italy’s north-south divide, its quest for a unifying language, and its passion for art, food, and family.
More about this BookPraise for the books of Joseph Luzzi
“The Italian Renaissance has rarely been so brilliantly examined or put before us in such a delectable style. I would recommend Botticelli’s Secret to anyone who loves art, who enjoys good storytelling, and who is interested in how the human spirit rediscovered itself in such a magnificent and dramatic fashion.”
—Jay Parini, author of Borges and Me
“A forthright chronicle of emergence from darkness.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Touches, lightly and elegantly, on politics, history, geography, sociology, language, literature, film, food and family . . . [There are] deeply felt stretches of memoir.”
―Craig Seligman, The New York Times Book Review
“A thought-provoking and well-written investigation of the role of history and realism in Italian cinema and the role played by the centuries-long tradition of poetry (or more precisely, poesis) in this quest.”
—Emiliano Perra, H-Italy
“Luzzi has accomplished the first wide-ranging analysis in English of Italian Romanticism and the myths associated with it.”
―Bruce Redford, Boston University