Dolce Vita Research Articles

Living la dolce vita: the impact of Italian culture on ideals of beauty

With both surgical and non-surgical cosmetic procedures on the rise worldwide, aesthetic nursing is becoming an increasingly popular profession. In this series, Aysha Mendes examines aesthetic nursing practices and cultural perceptions of beauty across the globe by focusing on a different country every month. This article looks at Italy's ties with plastic surgery history and admiration for all things aesthetic

“Endless Worlds of Meaning”: Sophia Hawthorne's Florence

It was June 6, 1858, and less than a week after arriving in Florence, Sophia Hawthorne was recording her first impressions, in her travel journal, of bella Firenze. A promenade at sunset along the Via Fornace, past the Duomo, Campanile, and Palazzo Vecchio, led to a vision of the fabled Arno river at twilight. "The Lung-Arno was lighted with gas along its whole extent, making a cornice of glittering gems, converging in the distance," Hawthorne wrote, "and the reflection of the illuminated border below made a fairy show. No painting, and scarcely a dream could equal the magical beauty of the scene. Florence is as enchanting as I expected. It is a place to live and be happy in--so cheerful, so full of art, and so well paved" (342). The idyll continued the next day, as the family reveled in their expansive quarters, the Casa del Bello, (2) secured for them by American expatriate sculptor and long-time resident of Florence, Hiram Powers. (3) "It is delicious weather to-day," Sophia records, and the air is full of the songs of birds. The merlins are in choir over against our terrace, in a wood of the Torrigian Gardens. The marble busts, on their pedestals, seem to enjoy the bosky shade. The green lizards run across the parapet, and to exist is a joy. J. [ulian] is drawing Pericles, in his little study, .... U.[na] is reading Tennyson, looking moony in white muslin. R.[ose] is playing with Stella [the servant] ... and Mr. H. is luxuriating down in the garden, buried up in roses and jessamine. "If the air stirs, it can only be by two contending butterflies," as Jean Paul says. (4) (NEI 343) Basking in beauty and a harmonious environment that nature and man have conspired to create--merlins and marble busts, bosky shade and Pericles--Hawthorne writes a Florentine paradise characterized not just by beauty but also by the ideal pursuits it actuates and the ideal family that pursues them. Tennyson and Greek sculpture occupy young minds; Americas great romancer muses in his garden; (5) and Sophia, co-creator of the family and the scene, writes it all. Certainly, this was la dolce vita. Yet this was only one side of the Florence Sophia came to know as the family sojourned there from June 1 to October 1, 1858. Other sides of the multi-faceted city emerged in her journal as the stay proceeded. Thus, by the end of her trip, in a mood reminiscent of those that frequently overtook her husband, Sophia would declare: "an inward persuasion that the fairness we see is not genuine prosperity and joy, comes at every turn in this enchanting country.... How mysterious are these old civilizations, which culminate and vanish, leaving ruin, desolation, and emptiness, shells of dead beauty, all over the earth! ... Italy, however, is not dead--only faint... (492-93). Florence, like Italy itself, held "endless worlds of meaning" for Hawthorne: my aim here is to delineate some of those meanings. First a word about the Hawthornes' Italian travels and Sophia's record of Florence. The family's continental rambles followed upon their five-year stay in England (July 1853-January 1858) during Nathaniel's tenure as Consul General to Liverpool, an appointment secured for him by his long-time friend, President Franklin Pierce. From London, in January, they traveled to Paris, and thence to Rome--the ultimate destination on any Grand Tour of Europe. The peripatetic family broke their one-year Roman stay with four months in Florence from June to October 1858, undertaken, likely, to escape the close heat of the Roman summer and the malaria that threatened there. The attempt, though, was vain: only two short weeks after returning to Rome, in early November, Hawthorne recorded in his journal that his eldest daughter Una had come down with Roman fever. She struggled with increasingly serious relapses for months until, at the end of May, 1859, she was finally well enough to travel. The weary family set out for England once more, where they remained for yet another year while Nathaniel readied his last novel, The Marble Faun, set in Rome and Florence, for the British press. …

Measurement invariance of big-five factors over the life span: ESEM tests of gender, age, plasticity, maturity, and la dolce vita effects.

This substantive-methodological synergy applies evolving approaches to factor analysis to substantively important developmental issues of how five-factor-approach (FFA) personality measures vary with gender, age, and their interaction. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) conducted at the item level often do not support a priori FFA structures, due in part to the overly restrictive assumptions of CFA models. Here we demonstrate that exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM), an integration of CFA and exploratory factor analysis, overcomes these problems with the 15-item Big Five Inventory administered as part of the nationally representative British Household Panel Study (N = 14,021; age: 15-99 years, Mage = 47.1). ESEM fitted the data substantially better and resulted in much more differentiated (less correlated) factors than did CFA. Methodologically, we extended ESEM (introducing ESEM-within-CFA models and a hybrid of multiple groups and multiple indicators multiple causes models), evaluating full measurement invariance and latent mean differences over age, gender, and their interaction. Substantively the results showed that women had higher latent scores for all Big Five factors except for Openness and that these gender differences were consistent over the entire life span. Substantial nonlinear age effects led to the rejection of the plaster hypothesis and the maturity principle but did support a newly proposed la dolce vita effect in old age. In later years, individuals become happier (more agreeable and less neurotic), more self-content and self-centered (less extroverted and open), more laid back and satisfied with what they have (less conscientious, open, outgoing and extroverted), and less preoccupied with productivity.

La Dolce Vita: Hedonic Estimates of Quality of Life in Italian Cities

Colombo E., Michelangeli A. and Stanca L. La dolce vita: hedonic estimates of quality of life in Italian cities, Regional Studies. This paper investigates quality of life in Italian cities using the hedonic approach. It analyses micro-level data for housing and labour markets to estimate compensating differentials for local amenities within four domains: weather, environment, services and society. Large compensating differentials in housing markets are found, whereas the effects on wages are relatively small. Quality of life varies substantially across space and is generally better in large and medium-sized cities of the Centre–North. Services and social conditions are strongly related to overall quality of life. It is also found that, across cities, quality of life is positively and significantly related to subjective well-being.

Motherhood after breast cancer: searching for la dolce vita

Advances in the field of adjuvant therapy in breast cancer have led to significant improvements in breast cancer survival. This has resulted in a progressive decline in breast cancer-related mortality, such that in 2010 there were estimated to be 400,000 breast cancer survivors under the age of 40 in the USA. Hence, enquiry into the feasibility of fertility preservation, subsequent pregnancy and breastfeeding is increasingly encountered. Fertility counseling remains suboptimal in breast cancer clinics, and there is a wide perception that pregnancy could worsen the prognosis of young breast cancer survivors, despite the lack of evidence supporting this notion. In addition, fertility preservation by means of embryo or oocyte cryopreservation requires ovarian stimulation, which is associated with a significant rise in estradiol levels and might delay initiation of therapy. All these factors, and others, have influenced the quality of fertility counseling offered to young breast cancer patients. In this article, we will critically analyze the available clinical and biological evidence on the safety and feasibility of pregnancy and breastfeeding following breast cancer. In addition, we will discuss the different fertility-preservation techniques available for these patients.

Jean‐Marc Reyrat (29/04/1967–28/10/2009)

Jean‐Marc Reyrat (29/04/1967–28/10/2009)

Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (review)

Reviewed by: Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age Timothy Dugdale (bio) Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. By Maggie Jackson. Amherst, N.Y., and Oxford: Prometheus Books, 2008. Pp. 327. $25.95. Recently I had the opportunity to enjoy a screening of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura. The print was pristine and the theater a marvel of comfort. The film is a bit of a slog, though, long and lugubrious, despite the “la dolce vita” vibes and the stunning vistas of Sicily. But I was struck at how the audience watched in rapt silence, save for the Italian granny behind me who kept grousing that she was once much more beautiful than “this” Monica Vitti. When the lights came up, I realized why the audience had been so attentive. Almost everyone in the hall was over forty. Some feminist linguists have suggested that men and women should be considered different species when it comes to language. Perhaps the same can be said for those who were born before the internet and the cell phone and those who came after. Perhaps the real Y2K virus is only now apparent— a generation of peevish, tubby humanoids distracted from the rigors and rewards of an engaged existence by glorified Tamaguchis. In her new book, Distracted, journalist Maggie Jackson has seen the future. And it’s in the past. She suggests that, contrary to popular belief, the original Dark Ages were technologically advanced. They also were spiritually bleak. The late, great George Carlin quipped that people have been “bought off” with gadgets and gizmos. As a zombie public taps away with rote ferocity on Black Berries, iPhones, and Xboxes, the powerful and the greedy indulge in whatever skullduggery they fancy—wars, corruption, pollution, prostitution, torture, wiretapping, etc. While America fidgets, Rome burns. Moreover, Jackson contends, because people can’t or won’t focus on anything for very long, they are unable to properly reflect on the vagaries, complexities, and caprices of life, essential to the forming of conscience, empathy, and a sense of social justice. Early in the book Jackson makes a pilgrimage to see Thomas Lynch, the famous mortician-poet. Lynch, wry as ever, muses that death isn’t what it used to be. One man’s funeral involved a display of his ashes and his golf clubs, as if he might nip back at any moment for a quick nine holes before a three-martini lunch. Jackson would have been wise to take Lynch’s cue and run toward an in-depth philosophical discussion about how communication technology and the attendant rise of wired life has created a powerful engine for death denial. The toys are always on, always beeping, buzzing, and chirping. On the web, information and personalities are always circulating, floating, waiting. But never exiting for good. One loses count of the ways in which American life is both pathetic and tragic but none is more heartbreaking than the simulation game Second [End Page 510] Life. In an online gaming universe, people can now manicure and massage a “perfect” life on the web while their life off-line becomes a shadow existence, best forgotten for its hard choices and harder knocks. Following on the work of John Durham Peters (Speaking into the Air, 1999), Jackson rightfully points out that, while communication technology has never been more advanced, Americans’ ability to connect on a meaningful level with one another has never been more provisional or problematic. People long for deep human connection but seem unable to make it happen, no matter how fast they type or how many blogs they read. Which is worse: cultural dross born of and made for flickering minds, or the cargo cult for delivery systems of said rubbish? Acolytes of a wired world will ask: Who cares if you’re downloading hardcore porn, just as long as you’re doing it on an iPod G3? That’s progress, baby, the cutting edge. Jackson is suitably suspicious. She’s not much enamored of capitalism either. Advertising, in particular, is highly adept at exploiting wireless technology to maximize distraction and minimize critical thought. The global economy is more and more...

Italy in Chiaroscuro: the dark shadows of modern Italian society

Italy's incapacity of dealing with an increasing decline should be attributed to a number of chronic problems, not only economic ones, which have never been seriously faced by Italian society and politics. Despite the frequent presence of these issues in public discourse, a lack of analytical commitment has favoured a superficial and rhetorical engagement. A common theme of incompleteness in the attempts at applying a solution unifies different problems presented in this special issue: from federal reform of the state to the lack of political reconciliation, from the troubled Italian southern regions to the policies towards families. This special issue aims to analyse some of the most critical and unsolved Italian problems, and tries to cast some light on the many ‘shadows’ that still persist in the country of la dolce vita.

Gemcitabine and radiotherapy in non-small cell lung cancer: dolce vita at last!

A hallmark of locally advanced non-small cell lung cancer is its high local and systemic recurrence rates, ranging from 60% to 80%. Radiotherapy has shown its efficacy in controlling the tumor and in increasing overall survival, especially with combined sequential or concurrent chemotherapy to allow an anti-tumoral synergy. Gemcitabine, a new generation cytotoxic agent, is a potent radiosensitizer in vitro, and thus appears as a promising molecule in these multimodal therapeutic regimens. If the initial trial with gemcitabine and radiation produced unacceptable toxicities, lessons were learned from this study, and further phase I-II trials demonstrated that in a clinical trial setting, gemcitabine and radiation can be given safely, both in sequential and concurrent chemoradiation regimens, leading to high response rates and prolonged survival. Gemcitabine-radiation combination is currently integrated in phase III trials evaluating the optimal therapeutic sequence in locally advanced non-small cell lung cancer, and appears as one of the most promising therapeutic regimen in thoracic oncology.

The Montesi Scandal: The Death of Wilma Montesi and the Birth of the Paparazzi in Fellini's Rome (review)

Reviewed by: The Montesi Scandal: The Death of Wilma Montesi and the Birth of the Paparazzi in Fellini’s Rome Manuela Marchesini (bio) Karen Pinkus, The Montesi Scandal: The Death of Wilma Montesi and the Birth of the Paparazzi in Fellini’s Rome. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 184 pp. $27.50 (cloth). Pinkus's book is dedicated to a famous scandal and unsolved mystery of the early 1950s in italy: the murder of Wilma Montesi, an attractive young girl from a small bourgeois family. Wilma's body was found on a beach outside Rome, face down in the sand, one morning in April 1953. Her body was clothed but missing shoes, stockings, and one garter belt; her lungs were filled with water and her vagina with sand. It was a tragic and inexplicable end that prompted a series of investigations and cover-ups amounting to a puzzling tangle, a pasticcio worthy of Carlo Emilio Gadda's fictional Quer Pasticciaccio Brutto De Via Merulana—the famous novel, similarly centered on the corpse of another (fictional) beautiful woman assassinated in similarly ambiguous circumstances, which had been serialized in the journal Letteratura just a few years earlier. Whereas Gadda's fictional background was a 1927 fascist Rome supposedly cleansed of crime by Mussolinian order, the backdrop of the Montesi case is the Rome of the frenzied "reconstruction years" following World War Ii, with its contamination of the holy and the profane. This Rome—which Fellini would immortalize shortly afterwards (in 1960) in La dolce vita, with its emerging media and paparazzi [End Page 109] along with the similarly emerging Cinecittà industry—is the backdrop of the crime in question, with its compound of tender but ambiguous petit bourgeois familial ties, the arrogant black fascist aristocracy, the offspring of influential politicians, starlets and Hollywood actresses, generic sinners coming from all ways of life, plus, needless to say, drugs and sex. Author and reader find understandably appealing such an intoxicating mix of traditionally elite and pop cultures, conveniently condensed in a single event, placed at the critical juncture of the Fifties—an event that at the time no one, not even the Pope, could refrain from commenting on. Hence Pinkus's promotion of the Montesi case to more than just another episode of cronaca nera. Instead, the Montesi scandal provides the almost filmic space where fiction and the real of contemporary Italian society commingle in the everyday life of its agents. Pinkus sets her own undertaking under the aegis of Henri Lefebvre, Michel De Certeau, and the school of "everyday life" (2). she thus manages to produce a well-written, evocative book that divorces the idea of a solution to the murder of Wilma Montesi in order to eye the broader horizon of the time period in question. She does so by way of a mix of reality (historical, written and visual documents) with fiction (her own recounting and the still frames of films that she deems evocative of the facts in question). The limit of such an accomplishment, if one wants to look for one, lies not so much in Pinkus's seemingly daring exploitation and montage of spurious sources (interviews, trial transcripts, pictures, still frames, narration, etc.), but rather in its imperfect radicalism. Pinkus's disclaimer at the beginning of her book ("this is not, strictly speaking, a work of academic theory" but rather an "interstitial" "series of notes of various registers and intensities for an unrealized screenplay" [1]), should not be taken at face value. It conceals the ambition of a project that, even more than to the theorists mentioned above, seems to point towards Walter Benjamin—although not the Benjamin Pinkus briefly mentions in passing (4), but the Benjamin of the Arcades Project, his major opus. in his unfinished Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin was after an innovative, awakened mode that would allow us to grasp the truth of our past, in particular the past of the Parisian arcades, in the process of our present, i.e., as it occurs. That perception would allow us to construct the totality of a single "moment of truth" or monad in the many fragmented sources, architecture, literature, posters, etc., or "crystals of the...

Elsa martinelli: Italy's audrey hepburn

Elsa martinelli: Italy's audrey hepburn

The Human Sweet Tooth

Humans love the taste of sugar and the word "sweet" is used to describe not only this basic taste quality but also something that is desirable or pleasurable, e.g., la dolce vita. Although sugar or sweetened foods are generally among the most preferred choices, not everyone likes sugar, especially at high concentrations. The focus of my group's research is to understand why some people have a sweet tooth and others do not. We have used genetic and molecular techniques in humans, rats, mice, cats and primates to understand the origins of sweet taste perception. Our studies demonstrate that there are two sweet receptor genes (TAS1R2 and TAS1R3), and alleles of one of the two genes predict the avidity with which some mammals drink sweet solutions. We also find a relationship between sweet and bitter perception. Children who are genetically more sensitive to bitter compounds report that very sweet solutions are more pleasant and they prefer sweet carbonated beverages more than milk, relative to less bitter-sensitive peers. Overall, people differ in their ability to perceive the basic tastes, and particular constellations of genes and experience may drive some people, but not others, toward a caries-inducing sweet diet. Future studies will be designed to understand how a genetic preference for sweet food and drink might contribute to the development of dental caries.

Dolce vita for PV in Italy?: New feed in tariff introduced for the Italian PV market

A brand new scheme for a first Italian feed-in tariff to finance grid connected PV plants has recently been introduced in Italy. Riccardo Battisti assesses what impact the new law might have in aiding further uptake of the technology in the region.

Beyond the Latin lover: Marcello Mastroianni, masculinity, and Italian cinema

Preface Acknowledgements 1. In the beginning: Mastroianni, Masculinity and Italian Cinema 2. Undressing the Latin Lover: La dolce vita, Fashion and Italian Masculinity 3. Masculinity, Sicilian Style: Il bell'Antonio and Divorce - Italian Style 4. Remember, It's a Comedy: Mastroianni in the Films of Federico Fellini 5. The Inetto versus the Unruly Woman: Mastroianni and Sophia Loren 6. Remembrance of Films Past: Mastroianni and the Aging Male Body Notes Bibliography Index

Federico Fellini: Contemporary Perspectives by Frank Burke , Marguerite R. Waller (review)

MLR, 98.4, 2003 1011 Federico Fellini: Contemporary Perspectives. Ed. by Frank Burke and Marguerite R. Waller. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2002. xxxii + 239 pp. ?42 (pbk ?15). ISBN 0-8020-0696-5 (pbk 0-8020-7647-5). Fellini's influence upon contemporary film directors remains considerable, despite an uneven cinematic output. He was arguably at his best while he drew on his early experiences of provincial and urban life, and incorporated the acerbic, observational humour of co-writers Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano into his screenplays. By con? trast, the second half of Fellini's career is characterized by a whimsical excess caused by his estrangement from Pinelli and Flaiano, and also by his rather stagnant, cosseted existence as an established director. This paucity of fresh life experiences prompted him to cannibalize existing literary works or recycle his own dreams and fantasies, some of which were decades old, into film projects. Consequently, most overviews of Fellini's filmography reveal that for every Dolce vita there is usually a Casanova lurking offscreen. Whether this collection of essays, together with Marguerite Waller's thoughtful introduction, will have 'a significant impact on filmstudies', as its introductory pages proclaim, is questionable. Similarly, the assertion that the volume employs 'a range of recent critical approaches' (p. i) is also debatable, given that the semiotic, psychoanalytical , feminist, and deconstructionist perspectives adopted by most of the contributors are past the firstflush of youth and approaching middle age. Although there is a whiff of the seventies about this anthology, Waller justifiably highlights the lack of critical material on Fellini written during this theoretically productive decade, and in a sense the application of these perspectives to Fellini's work within this volume fillsa discernible gap within scholarly writing on Italian film. Using a semiotic approach, Frank Burke focuses primarily on the final, postmod? ern phase of Fellini's career, when his work consistently transformed the real and the representable into pure sign. Burke convincingly argues that certain effects in Casanova, such as the (in)famous 'garbage bag sea', exemplify the director's attempts to erase referentsaltogether, but is generous in his interpretation ofthe self-indulgent Intervista as 'codified' and 'parodic' in the way it constructs meaning through recycling Fellini's past films and experiences, and by exhibiting his film-making routine. Christopher Sharratt highlights Toby Dammit as a pivotal moment in Fellini's ceuvre, a film which marked a transition towards 'artificial cinema' and artifice, and which, together with the self-consciousness of later films, formed a basis for the director's critique of the 'formulaic, mind-deadening, mass production of art, the culture industry 's resuscitation and reformulation of bankrupt styles and conventions in its constant search for new forms and satisfactions' (p. 123). On a related theme, Millicent Marcus contributes a valuable discussion of Fellini's portrayal of television in Ginger e Fred, the medium constituting another source of signs that endlessly reflect other signs without any trace of a referent. Marcus also argues that beyond its surface attack on the brutalizing effectof commercial television upon the world of cinema, the film also contains an implicit indictment of cinema itself as a medium of simulation and self-referentiality. Through an analysis of Fellini's scepticism towards intellectuals, and towards lan? guage as a communication tool, William Van Watson's Lacan-influenced essay posi? tions Fellini's work in the realm ofthe visual imaginary rather than within the verbal symbolic, and interprets the director's keenness on studio filming as an example of a desire to reincorporate reality into the Imaginary Order, within a 'studio-womb'. Yet, as sometimes occurs with psychoanalytically oriented work, biographical detail?not in the formofunreliable quotations from Fellini himself, which several contributors to this volume use unquestioningly, but in terms of corroborated accounts from friends and family?can prove equally illuminating. It is well documented that Fellini's 1012 Reviews provincial upbringing made for an ambivalent attitude towards Rome's intellectuals; similarly,aftera frustratingspell of location filmingon a beach forLo sceicco bianco, he subsequently preferred to reinvent reality on his own terms in the studios of Cinecitta. Virginia Picchietti's study of Lo sceicco bianco explores the paradox that emerges when...

Pilgrimage to Patronage: Lope de Vega and the Court of Philip III, 1598-1621 by Elizabeth E. Wright (review)

1012 Reviews provincial upbringing made for an ambivalent attitude towards Rome's intellectuals; similarly,aftera frustratingspell of location filmingon a beach forLo sceicco bianco, he subsequently preferred to reinvent reality on his own terms in the studios of Cinecitta. Virginia Picchietti's study of Lo sceicco bianco explores the paradox that emerges when differentdefinitions of femininity in a particular culture are deemed to be conflictual , and Aine O'Healy pursues a related theoretical strand in a discussion of the way Fellini foregrounds the cinematic construction of women as projections of male fantasy and desire, hovering ambivalently between voyeuristic indulgence and a cri? tique of the masculine biases of cinematic practices. Dorothee Bonnigal's analysis of Amarcord focuses profitably on the film's use of characters such as Gradisca to demystifythe kitsch self-idealization of Fascism and also to highlight the movement's compatibility with the phoney glamour and artistic totalitarianism of Hollywood. While Cosetta Gaudenzi raises a valid issue in her discussion of the youths' use of Romagnol dialect as a subversive device to undermine political and scholastic authori? tarianism in the same film,the critic is on less secure ground when she draws attention to the Tuscan and Neapolitan accents of the senior Fascist characters without exploring the possibility that Fellini may have been indulging in historical revisionism by distancing his compaesani from the party's upper echelons. The volume also contains a discussion by Helen Stoddart of Fellini's use of circus imagery and the carnivalesque, and an analysis by Marguerite Waller ofthe dissonant visual language within La dolce vita, while Carlo Testa explores Fellini's interest in the works of Kafka, an affinitythat resulted in America being used as the basis for the director's fictitious film project in Intervista. In a theoretical context, the recent critical work within filmstudies regarding the viewer's cognitive and affective involvement in films,an orientation typified by Plantinga and Smith's excellent Passionate Views: Film, Cognition and Emotion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), constitutes uncharted territoryforthis particular volume. Nevertheless, the traditional approaches employ ed here are perfectly legitimate and largely effective in terms of shedding light on the aesthetic choices and forms of representation to be found in Fellini's work. University of Salford William Hope Pilgrimage to Patronage: Lope de Vega and the Court of Philip III, 15Q8-1621. By Elizabeth E. Wright. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London: Asso? ciated University Presses. 2001. 184 pp. ?3?- ISBN 0-8387-5454-6. Lope de Vega (1562-1635) was arguably the greatest and undoubtedly the most prolific of Spanish dramatists. His three hundred or so surviving plays demonstrate an unrivalled ability to entertain all levels of Golden Age society. Yet, in spite of his enormous popularity, he had great difficultyin gaining formal recognition because the public theatre in Spain was still only very gradually beginning to acquire literary respectability. So, from the late 1590s, he began to broaden the scope of his writing, turning his attention to the publication of more ambitious works than the plays and short lyrical pieces to which he had previously dedicated his attention. Quite suddenly , epic poems such as La Dragontea (Valencia, 1598) and La Jerusalen conquistada (Madrid, 1609), the adventure romance El peregrino en supatria (Seville, 1604), the prose eclogue Arcadia (Madrid, 1598), and the enormous hagiographic epic Isidro (Madrid, 1599) rolled offthe presses as part of Lope's strategy to draw attention to his personal credentials as an author. Yet, at the same time, he continued his career as a popular dramatist, while also providing plays for the new court theatre, as well as producing verse that both praised and satirized the Spanish nobility. It is this MLRy 98.4, 2003 1013 prodigiously diverse output that provides the basis forElizabeth Wright's analysis of Lope's career at the court ofPhilip III, a king whose reign coincided with a significant period of social and political transition that is most closely linked to the ascendancy of the Duke of Lerma. As such, Wright's book complements recent research on the Spanish Habsburg court in the early seventeenth century, as well as New Historicist work on the changing social identities and motivations of early modern...

Understanding Tim Parks

Described by late poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky as the best British author writing today, Tim Parks is as prolific a journalist, critic and translator as he is a novelist. In this book, Gillian Fenwick explores Parks' body of work and maintains that Parks is epitome of modern man of letters. The novels that Parks set in his English homeland - such as Loving Roger, Home Thoughts, and Family Planning - are complex texts treading between tragedy and comedy. Fenwick asserts that Parks' heroes and heroines are real people who make readers empathize with them and their indecision. Parks' writing crosses genres as well as international boundaries. Fenwick argues that Parks' sojourn brought a richness to his work. Wanting no part of saccharine treatments of la dolce vita, Parks has in Italian Neighbours and An Education described ordinary, at times frustrating, life in Italy with a touch of cynicism. Parks establishes himself as an Englishman in Verona - he sees his home country with an increased objectivity but is not quite fully assimilated into his new country. At same time, his time in Italy has allowed him a much broader, European perspective: his novels Shear and Europa, which are set on Continent and feature characters of several European nationalities, capture his enlarged European scope. From Parks's novels and nonfiction books to his translations and journalism, Fenwick reckons with Parks's full literary range and sheds light on work of a versatile English writer whose international recognition is steadily growing.

The Spleen of Rome: Modernism in Fellini's La dolce vita

The Spleen of Rome: Modernism in Fellini's La dolce vita

THE SCENT OF ROSES: ALMA-TADEMA AND THE OTHER SIDE OF ROME

Alma-Tadema’s Rome is not the Rome of Caesar and Cicero, Livy and Virgil, nor the Rome of mifitarism, heroism, and triumphant imperialism. Instead i t is a hedonistic society preoccupied with the pleasure of the senses. From the ostentatious public facade of the city itself, to the dolce vita along the Bay of Naples, it is the unofficial, the ‘other’ side of Roman culture which Alma-Tadema invites us to enter and enjoy. We are to be fascinated by the idle rich at their leisure, to delight with the revellers who carouse and the lovers who make love; and to marvel at the magnificence, opulence and utter decadence of the imperial circle. Surprisingly, perhaps, this Rome is not a fantastic vision crcated to pander to a taste for the exotic, but a world carefully constructed from ancient sources. In it we can discern the amusing and anecdotal historical world of Suetonius, the all-too-luxurious and corrupt society exposed in the moralistic writings of the elder Pliny and Seneca, the Satires of Juvenal and Persius, and the Rome of wine and roses as proclaimed by Catullus, Horace and the elegiac poets. The artist selects historical and literary texts and archaeological artefacts which seem calculated to draw our attention to the exciting, the corrupt and the risqut. And yet another surprise, perhaps Alma-Tadema never appeals directly to the senses in that we see few scenes of debauch or erotic nudity; instead it is the intellect which he seeks to provoke and to intrigue. To realise the ‘Bacchanalian phrenzy’ which so upset Ruskin,* we are directed to a cleverly coded imagery concealed within his canvases: inscriptions are obscured, statues cut off, and references made to half-remembered histories. On an initial reading many paintings appear little more than gorgeous depictions of marble, flowers and Mediterranean sunlight, until we decipher the imagery which invariably subverts apparent meaning. In Alma-Tadema’s quest for the underside of Roman life, roses have a special significance. Flowers appear in a large number of his paintings: women smell flowers in Confidences ( I 869: Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), In the Peristylum ( 1 866: untraced) and In the Corner of my Studio ( 1 893: Private Collection), while flowers serve as colourful accessories in many other works. Roses, in particular, are presented as gifts between lovers in A Love Missile ( 1 878: untraced), Welcome Footsteps ( I 883: Private Collection) and A Silent Greeting (1 889: ’ An earlier version of this article was delivered as a paper to two different audiences at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool and at King’s College London. My thanks in particular to several members of the Department of Classics at Kings for their helpful comments. * In his famous lecture, ‘Classic Schools of Painting: Sir F. Leighton and Alma Tadema’, delivered at Oxford in May 1883, Ruskin describes Alma-Tadema’s images of ancient life a. ‘the last corruption of this Roman state, and its Bacchanalian phrenzy’; The Art und the Pleasures of En~lund (London 1900) 86.

Religion and Politics in Postcommunist Russia

From the Editors: A vigorous discussion of the place and role of religion in our society began a few years ago and has gradually assumed an important place in reflections on the prospects of society's development and, above all, in the sphere of intellectual life. The reason is clear: in a period when official communist ideals and values are in a state of collapse and as the country slips progressively into moral license and its orientation is shifting toward a plebeian version of the longed-for dolce vita, it is religion that is seen as an ideology that might provide a disoriented society with norms and values that are not subject to the corrosion of time and are able to function in the living everyday consciousness of the masses. Nor will we forget the purposeful activity of a multitude of religious preachers. It is equally obvious that the influence of the church and various religious associations on the country's political life has intensified notably in recent years. And so we are witnessing a ...