The Merchant of Prato

Author: Iris Origo
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 168137420X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
A warm, intimate, and engrossing biography of Francesco di Marco Datini, who built a powerful mercantile network in fourteenth-century Tuscany, and a peerless evocation of the sensations, personalities, and everyday struggles of Italian life more than half a millennium in the past. “For God and Profit” is how the medieval merchant Francesco di Marco Datini headed a notebook in which he kept track of his business dealings, and these were certainly his guiding lights. Born in the 1330s in the Tuscan town of Prato, the son of a poor taverner, Datini set out at the age of fifteen for Avignon, where, over the course of the next thirty-five years, he made a fortune trading in arms, armor, artworks, wool, saffron, leather, silk, and much more. Returning home, he expanded his operations, setting up offices all across the Mediterranean, which he oversaw through an unceasing flow of correspondence. When he died, Datini asked that all his papers be preserved in his house, and in 1870 they were found, a little worm-eaten and mouse-nibbled but largely intact, in a sack under the stairs. They are one of the great records not only of medieval life but of the emergence of the modern commercial world. Drawing on this rich archive, Iris Origo offers a wonderfully vivid account of Datini’s public and private worlds. The Merchant of Prato is a masterpiece of modern narrative history.

The Merchant of Prato's Wife

Author: Ann Crabb
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472119494
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
The first full study of the life of Margherita Datini illuminates the role and social standing of wives in early modern Italian society

Letters to Francesco Datini

Author: Margherita Datini
Publisher: Iter
ISBN: 9780772721167
Category : Florence (Italy)
Languages : en
Pages : 431

Book Description

A Florentine Merchant

Author: Giovanni Caselli
Publisher: Peter Bedrick Books
ISBN: 9780872261075
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 36

Book Description
Presents a story of a rich merchant, Francesco Datini, and his household in northern Italy in the late fourteenth century, seen from the viewpoint of a slave, depicting the merchant's life in the town of Prato and his work in nearby Florence.

Images and Shadows

Author: Iris Origo
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681373653
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 393

Book Description
An extraordinary memoir by Iris Origo, who chronicled political life in A Chill in the Air and War in Val d'Orcia, and now turns inward to describe her own family, the work of writing, and the transcience of memory. Images and Shadows, Iris Origo’s autobiographical account of her early life, is as perceptive and humane and beautifully written as her celebrated memoir War in Val d’Orcia. Origo’s father came from an old and moneyed American family, her mother was the daughter of an Irish peer, and Iris grew up in the most privileged of circumstances. Her father died of tuberculosis when he was only thirty, and her mother moved to Fiesole, Italy, where she and Iris developed a close friendship with the great connoisseur and art historian Bernard Berenson. Later, Origo and her Italian husband transformed a desolate and deforested Tuscan property into a flourishing estate, and it was there that she discovered her true calling as a writer. In Images and Shadows, Origo paints portraits of her shy, loving father and her headstrong mother, and describes beloved places, the books that formed her sensibility, and how she grew up and made her way in the world. She reflects on the pleasures and challenges of writing and evokes the persistence and fragility of memory. Images and Shadows is an autobiography that is as thoughtful as it is profoundly touching.

Story of My People

Author: Edoardo Nesi
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
ISBN: 1590515552
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Book Description
Winner of the 2011 Strega Prize, this blend of essay, social criticism, and memoir is a striking portrait of the effects of globalization on Italy’s declining economy. Starting from his family’s textile factory in Prato, Tuscany, Edoardo Nesi examines the recent shifts in Italy’s manufacturing industry. Only one generation ago, Prato was a thriving industrial center that prided itself on craftsmanship and quality. But during the last decade, cheaply made goods—produced overseas or in Italy by poorly paid immigrants—saturated the market, making it impossible for Italian companies to keep up. In 2004 his family was forced to sell the textile factory. How this could have happened? Nesi asks, and what are the wider repercussions of losing businesses like his family’s, especially for Italian culture? Story of My People is a denouncement of big business, corrupt politicians, the arrogance of economists, and cheap manufacturing. It’s a must-read for anyone seeking insight into the financial crisis that’s striking Europe today.

Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy

Author: Christiane Klapisch-Zuber
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226439267
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Book Description
English translations of the author's most important articles.

Iris Origo

Author: Caroline Moorehead
Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher
ISBN: 9781567921830
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 396

Book Description
A biography.

Francesco Di Marco Datini

Author: Istituto internazionale di storia economica F. Datini
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788884536426
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : it
Pages : 582

Book Description
Betrifft die Handschrift Mss.h.h.I.1, p. 289 der Burgerbibliothek Bern (Abb. 60).

A Chill in the Air

Author: Iris Origo
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681372657
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Book Description
This recently discovered “trenchant, intelligent” follow-up to the British expatriate’s classic memoir, War in Val d’Orcia, chronicles life in Italy in the year leading up to WW2 (New Yorker). This insightful diary provides a vivid, ground-level account of how Mussolini decided on a course of action that would devastate his country and ultimately destroy his regime. In 1939 it was not a foregone conclusion that Mussolini would enter World War II on the side of Hitler. Though the British-born Origo lived with her Italian husband on an estate in a remote part of Tuscany, she was supremely well-connected and regularly in touch with intellectual and diplomatic circles in Rome, where her godfather, William Phillips, was the American ambassador. Her diary documents the Fascist government’s growing infatuation with Nazi Germany as Hitler’s armies marched triumphantly across Europe, and the campaign of propaganda and intimidation that was mounted in support of its new aims. The book ends with the birth of Origo’s daughter and Origo’s decision to go to Rome to work with prisoners of war at the Italian Red Cross. A Chill in the Air oﬀers an indispensable record of Italy at war as well as a thrilling story of a formidable woman’s transformation from observer to actor at a great historical turning point.