Joseph Luzzi Book order

"A new volume in the Lives of Great Religious Books series, this book explores the creation and cultural afterlives of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy"--

A New Yorker Best Book of 2022 A Guardian Book of the Day “Brilliantly conceived and executed, Botticelli's Secret is a riveting search for buried treasure.”—Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve

A Cinema of Poetry brings Italian film studies into dialogue with fields outside its usual purview by showing how films can contribute to our understanding of aesthetic questions that stretch back to Homer. Joseph Luzzi considers the relationship between film and literature, such as the cinematic adaptation of literary sources, and more generally the fields of rhetoric, media studies, and modern Italian culture. The book balances theoretical inquiry with close readings of films by the masters of Italian cinema: Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci, and others. Luzzi's study is the first to show how Italian filmmakers address such crucial aesthetic issues as the nature of the chorus, the relationship between symbol and allegory, the literary prehistory of montage, and the place of poetry in cinematic expression--what Pasolini called the "cinema of poetry." While Luzzi establishes how certain qualities of film--its link with technological processes, capacity for mass distribution, synthetic virtues (and vices) as the so-called total art--have reshaped centuries-long debates, A Cinema of Poetry also explores what is specific to the Italian art film and, more broadly, Italian cinematic history, which lends to this national cinema its unique aesthetic perspectives. In other words, what makes this version of the art film recognizably "Italian"? --Provided by publisher

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.

A story of love and grief. I became a widower and a father on the same day' says Joseph Luzzi. His book tells how Dante's The Divine Comedy' helped him to endure his grief, raise their infant daughter, and rediscover love.

Exploring the intersection of film and literature, this work examines how cinematic adaptations enrich our understanding of longstanding aesthetic questions. Joseph Luzzi delves into the relationship between Italian films and literary sources, while also engaging with rhetoric and media studies. By bridging these disciplines, the book highlights the impact of modern Italian culture on cinematic expression and invites readers to reconsider the role of film in the broader context of artistic discourse.