Arrogant, self-centered movie director Guido Contini finds himself struggling to find meaning, purpose, and a script for his latest film endeavor. Ten days away from the start of principal filming of his latest movie--ambitiously titled "Italia"--he has no idea for the movie at all. Escaping all the pressure at a seaside resort, he thinks about the women who have shaped his life: Mamma, judgmental but affectionate; Luisa, cherished yet under appreciated...

Opportunity knocks in the form of a wealthy American shipbuilder who hires Tom to travel to Italy to bring back his playboy son. Ripley worms his way into the idyllic lives of Dickie and his girlfriend, plunging into a daring scheme of duplicity, lies and murder.

Portrays an Italian mother who along with her daughter is raped by soldiers during World War II. Tells how they find their way back to life and survive the horror of war.

"To the entire world, Gino Bartali was merely a champion cyclist. But Gino's greatest achievement was something he never told a soul--that he secretly worked with the Italian resistance to save hundreds of Jewish men, women, and children, and others, fromcertain death, using the one thing no authority would question: his bicycle"--

"Once a skinny and weak child, Gino Bartali rose to become a Tour de France champion and one of cycling's greatest stars. But all that seemed unimportant when his country came under the grip of a brutal dictator and entered World War II on the side of Nazi Germany. Bartali might have appeared a mere bystander to the harassment and hatred directed toward Italy's Jewish people, but secretly he accepted a role in a dangerous plan to help them. Putting...

A burned-out business executive from Toronto travels back to his family farm in rural Italy to reconnect with his roots and find new meaning in life.

As much a visionary as he is an architect, Paolo Soleri, born in Turin in 1919, worked with Frank Lloyd Wright in the late 1940s and went on to develop his own organically expressive architecture. Since 1935 he has been involved almost exclusively with the design of alternative urban planning models. By 1970 he had designed thirty "Arcologies," his term for a series of high-density, fantastically unreal megastructures for up to six million inhabitants....

During World War II an Italian Jewish man uses his vivid imagination to convince his son they're playing a game at a concentration camp in order to keep his son's spirits up.

"From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea and The Blue Guitar--a dazzling new novel that extends the story of Isabel Archer, the heroine of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, into unexpected (and completely stand-alone) territory. Isabel Archer is a young American woman, swept off to Europe in the late nineteenth century by an aunt who hopes to round out the impetuous but naive girl's experience of the world. When Isabel comes into a...