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.

Iris Origo

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

Book Description
A biography.

A Need to Testify

Author: Iris Origo
Publisher: Helen Marx Books
ISBN: 9781885586513
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 414

Book Description
Introduction by Ted Morgan When originally released in the early 1980s, New Statesman called Origo's final book 'a sensitive and beautifully written book by a remarkable writer.' Available again in this new edition, Origo's memoir tells the story of four friends, writer Lauro de Bosis, American monologuist Ruth Draper, the historian Gaetano Salvemi, and author of 'Fontamara' and 'Bread and Wine', Ignazio Silone, each of whom made various life sacrifices in the fight for a non-fascist Italy. Illustrated throughout with photos.

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.

War in Val D'Orcia

Author: Iris Origo
Publisher: Allison & Busby
ISBN: 0749040548
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Book Description
It is quite impossible to attach importance to material possessions now. All that one still clings to is a few vital affections' Iris Origo, October 1943. Marchesa Iris Origo and her husband had been settled at their rural estate of La Foce since 1924. When the Second World War broke out Origo, an Englishwoman married to an Italian landowner, had divided loyalties. But as the war dragged on and the hostilities escalated, the small community of Val d'Orcia found themselves helping evacuees, orphans, refugees, prisoners of war and soldiers from both sides, concerned less with who was fighting whom than caring for those who needed their aid. Origo kept her diary throughout this time, when the risk of betrayal was a fact of life and the penalty for helping the enemy would result in death. Even with German troops occupying her manor house, she wrote at night about her valiant attempts to shelter refugees, burying her diary in the garden each morning. The result is a book which has become a classic, an affirmation in itself of courage and resistance, and an unsentimental, compelling story of the trials and tragedies of wartime.

Leopardi

Author: I. Origo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description

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.

La Foce

Author: Benedetta Origo
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812235932
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Book Description
Situated in the Val d'Orcia, a wide valley in southeastern Tuscany, La Foce is run by Benedetta and Donata Origo, and is open to the public one day a week.".

Iris Origo

Author: Caroline Moorehead
Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher
ISBN: 9781567922714
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Book Description
A biography.

The Last Attachment

Author: Iris Origo
Publisher: John Murray
ISBN: 9780719523205
Category : Poets, English
Languages : en
Pages : 533

Book Description
When Maggie's husband, smooth, silver-haired, patrician Jeremy, the British Ambassador to Vienna, drops dead unexpectedly of a heart attack, she is stunned. But her shock soon turns to fury when she discovers that he died in the arms of a beautiful blonde Viennese hostess - and that moreover while she, Maggie, was expected to make all sorts of domestic economies on behalf of the British tax-payer, Jeremy and the athletic Mausie had been indulging in expensive sea-food dinners, skiing trips and all manner of luxuries.But Mausie turns out to be, as it were, only the tip of the iceberg. As Maggie uncovers a trail of infidelities conducted under her nose in every one of the European cities she had so dutifully made her home in Jeremy's majestic wake, she determines to exact her revenge. With Zoltan, Jeremy's mournful Hungarian driver, she embarks on a magnificent Grand Tour of their former postings, wreaking a pleasurable havoc wherever she goes. Along the way, Maggie undergoes her own transformation and learns to re-evaluate her marriage, her own abilities - and just who her friends really are...