Italy, a Cultural Guide

by Ernest O. Hauser

Book Overview

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0689111754
• ISBN13: 9780689111754
• Release Date: January 1981
• Publisher: Atheneum Books
• Length: 276 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.

Customer Reviews

An exquisite feast for the mind!

Only because nobody else has done it, and this is one of my favortite titles on Italy, I'll undertake a modest review of this text. First, it is like a very high quality, superbly seasoned popcorn. It covers nearly 100 separate topics, arranged alphabetically, in around 250, or 2 1/2 pages each. You can't eat just one.Superficial? Try, just super. As Voltaire said in a contrasting situation to a friend, "I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time." This author did. And he distilled out all of the fat leaving nothing but the most succulent for the reader to engorge. Range? Everything from the Norman invasion to Baroque architecture, through the counter-reformation to the Grand Tour. My favorite meal is a 2 page chapter (p. 130) on "Laocoon" a marble sculpture from around the first century (BC or AD?) which was heralded as THE great sculpture of antiquity by Pleny the Elder in his "Natural History" but was lost for the next 1400 years until being discovered in 1506 beneath a vineyard in Rome near a house owned by Nero. Michaelangelo and the other artists of the day ran to see it; their sponsor Julius II bought it.The sculpture is of a scene in the Trojan Wars and depicts a father, Laocoon, and two sons sacrificing a bull at the time that they Trojans are falling for the Greek ruse (which Laocoon foresaw and warned against) and moving the "Trojan Horse" into their city. In the scene the father attempts to save his two sons from destruction by a sea monster sent to punish Laocoon for warning the Trojans.The totally romantic piece of Italian culture, for me, is the vignette about the missing arm. It seems that when found after 14 centuries a right arm was missing off of Laocoon. Various efforts were made to "fix" the sculpture, none apparently successful aesthetically.Then, in 1905, an obviously knowledgeable German art dealer, Ludwig Pollack, while rummaging in a Roman stonemason's shop, stumbled upon what he recognized to be the missing arm of Laocoon -- 399 years after the sculpture itself had been found and nearly 2 millenia after the whole thing was initially lost!THIS is Italy! Magic, wonder, mystery, excitement. You can't beat it. I was about to loan my copy of this book to a friend, but wanted to check its availability -- because I already lost my other copy of the book by loaning it to another friend. Now that I know it's out of print, I'm going to simply assign to friend no. 2 my ownership rights in volume loaned to friend no. 1.