Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking
1992 · 736 pages
Marcella Hazan taught America what Italians actually eat, region by region, and her rule is exacting: buy well, do less, wait. Her tomato sauce is a can, an onion halved, and butter.
★ 4.7
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
The Honored Society
1964 · 265 pages
Lewis walked postwar Sicily and found monks running extortion from the confessional and Mafia bosses installed as mayors by American liberators, whose invasion, he argues, restored what Mussolini had nearly destroyed.
★ 4.7
The Complete Little World of Don Camillo
1948 · 272 pages
The comic cycle that became Italian folklore sets a hot-tempered priest against the Communist mayor of a Po Valley village, with the crucifix above the altar talking Don Camillo down from revenge.
★ 5.0
The Gallery
1947 · 342 pages
Occupied Naples, 1944: soldiers and civilians trading cigarettes, sex, and rumor under the arcade. Burns writes Americans who understand nothing of the country they hold, and a bar where gay soldiers breathe.
★ 5.2
Call Me By Your Name
2007 · 256 pages
Elio is seventeen the summer a visiting scholar stays six weeks at his family's house on the Italian coast. Aciman renders desire from the inside, every calculation and humiliation of wanting someone.
★ 5.4
Foucault's Pendulum
1988 · 623 pages
Three editors, buried in crank manuscripts about the Templars, invent a secret history of the world as a joke and feed it to a computer. Then the actual occultists arrive, wanting the secret.
★ 5.5
Rubicon
2003 · 464 pages
The Roman Republic destroyed itself, and Tom Holland tells it at the pace of a thriller. Caesar reaches the Rubicon with a single legion, knowing crossing it means war against his own state.
★ 6.0
The Talented Mr. Ripley
1955 · 288 pages
Sent to Italy to fetch a shipping magnate's son, Tom Ripley falls for the life instead, murders his friend, and wears his name. Highsmith makes you want him to get away with it.
★ 6.3
The Day of the Owl
1961 · 124 pages
A small-time builder is shot running for a bus in a Sicilian square, and every passenger saw nothing. Sciascia named the Mafia as an organization while Italy still insisted it did not exist.
★ 6.5
Christ Stopped at Eboli
1945 · 288 pages
Banished by Mussolini to a village in the Italian south, a Turin doctor found peasants convinced Christ had stopped short of them. The book made postwar Italy confront a region it had abandoned.
★ 6.5
Zeno's Conscience
1923 · 464 pages
Zeno quits smoking constantly and never quits. Told by his analyst to write his life, he sets down a marriage begun by proposing to three sisters in one evening, and lies gorgeously throughout.
★ 6.6
My Brilliant Friend
2011 · 336 pages
No novelist has written female friendship with this much competition. Elena and Lila grow up in a violent Naples neighborhood in the 1950s, and only one is allowed to stay in school.
★ 6.7
SPQR
A History of Ancient Rome
2015 · 608 pages
Beard covers a thousand years of Rome, opening on Catiline's conspiracy and closing the day Caracalla made every free inhabitant a citizen, and she cares as much about slaves as emperors.
★ 6.7
Augustus
1972 · 305 pages
Rome's first emperor assembled from other people's letters: soldiers, poets, conspirators, and the daughter he sends into exile. Williams shows how a sickly boy became master of the world and what it cost.
★ 6.8
Julius Caesar
1599 · 288 pages
Brutus is persuaded that killing his friend will save the republic. Antony stands over the body, says he comes to bury Caesar and not to praise him, and turns Rome around.
★ 6.8
The Baron In The Trees
1957 · 320 pages
At twelve, refusing a plate of snails his father demands he eat, Cosimo climbs into an oak and never touches ground again. He reads, loves, and fights the eighteenth century from the branches.
★ 6.8
The Cheese and the Worms
1976 · 224 pages
A sixteenth-century Italian miller told the Inquisition that the world formed as cheese forms from milk, and the angels were worms in it. From that file Ginzburg reconstructs an entire peasant mind.
★ 6.8
Four Comedies
200 BC · 242 pages
Plautus stole Greek plots and made them Roman, vulgar and fast. Shakespeare lifted his mistaken twins for The Comedy of Errors, Moliere lifted his miser, and farce has run on that machinery since.
★ 7.0
I, Claudius
1934 · 468 pages
Stammering, limping, and dismissed as an idiot, Claudius survives the Roman imperial family as it murders its way through Augustus, Tiberius, and Caligula, then sets down the secret history of what he watched.
★ 7.0
On Friendship
44 BC · 384 pages
Cicero gives the argument to Laelius, a statesman grieving his dead friend: real friendship binds only good men, is wanted for nothing beyond itself, and makes fortune brighter and hardship lighter.
★ 7.0