Story Of Ferrara

The main theme of Giorgio Bassani's novels and short stories, which have earned him wide acclaim outside Italy, has been the advent of anti-Semitism in the provincial Italian city of Ferrara during World War II. Earlier he had a successful career as an editor with a major publishing house, being credited with helping to bring to public notice The Leopard by Tomasi Lampedusa. Bassani edited a literary magazine and was director of the Italian radio-television network. His first collection of short pieces was A City on the Plain, written under the pseudonym Giacomo Marchi. His volumes of poems were finally collected and published in 1963. The stories and novels that were to make him famous abroad began to appear in the 1950s. They include A Prospect of Ferrara (1960), and The Gold Rimmed Spectacles (1960). A film version of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1962) by Vittorio De Sica has become a public television classic.

Bassani's six classic books, collected for the first time in English as the epic masterwork they were intended to be. Set in the northern Italian town of Ferrara before, during, and after the Second World War, The Novel of Ferrara brings together Bassani's six classic books, fully revised as a single volume by the author at the end of his life: Within the Walls, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Behind the Door, The Heron and The Smell of Hay. These interlocking stories present a fully rounded world of unforgettable characters, memorializing not only the Ferrarese people, but the city itself, which assumes a character and a voice deeply inflected by the Jewish community to which the narrator belongs. 'Exquisite . . . from his boyhood Ferrara and the families he knew, Bassani has carved out a corner of Italy that rises above regionalism with fiction that can stand alongside the most lingering written in Europe to day' The New York Times

The Story Behind the Mafia Murder that Riveted New York On the afternoon of February 10, 1979, Theresa Ferrara took a phone call at Apple Hair Cutters on Long Island, New York. Then she headed out the door-"to make an easy $10,000," as she told her niece. She said she'd be back in ten minutes. That was the last time anyone ever saw her alive. The FBI ruled it a homicide. But what really happened to Theresa Ferrara? Was she killed over her involvement in the Mafia's legendary Lufthansa Heist-the biggest in history? Was she murdered in connection to her rumored informing on New York drug dealers? Or was it something else entirely? Was she even dead? Looking for Closure chronicles her niece's courageous and decades-long journey to uncover the truth behind her beloved aunt's mysterious disappearance-and the partial remains that turned up three months later, identified as Theresa's. Using police and court records, newspaper reports, interviews and new forensics technology, Maria Stewart pushes for a renewed investigation into the case. And she discovers the incredible secrets behind a life she thought she knew. Through it all, this real-life thriller provides important new details on the case that riveted the papers and served as inspiration for characters in the movies "Goodfellas" and "Ten Million Dollar Getaway." Stewart examines every possible lead-from mysterious phone calls purporting that Theresa was still alive to a psychic's intriguing statements. But what she discovers could be even more shocking than she imagined possible.

In this exhilarating celebration of human ingenuity and perseverance—published all around the world—a trailblazing Italian scholar sifts through our cultural and social behavior in search of the origins of our greatest invention: writing. The L where a tabletop meets the legs, the T between double doors, the D of an armchair’s oval backrest—all around us is an alphabet in things. But how did these shapes make it onto the page, never mind form complex structures such as this sentence? In The Greatest Invention, Silvia Ferrara takes a profound look at how—and how many times—human beings have managed to produce the miracle of written language, traveling back and forth in time and all across the globe to Mesopotamia, Crete, China, Egypt, Central America, Easter Island, and beyond. With Ferrara as our guide, we examine the enigmas of undeciphered scripts, including famous cases like the Phaistos Disk and the Voynich Manuscript; we touch the knotted, colored strings of the Inca quipu; we study the turtle shells and ox scapulae that bear the earliest Chinese inscriptions; we watch in awe as Sequoyah single-handedly invents a script for the Cherokee language; and we venture to the cutting edge of decipherment, in which high-powered laser scanners bring tears to an engineer’s eye. A code-cracking tour around the globe, The Greatest Invention chronicles a previously uncharted journey, one filled with past flashes of brilliance, present-day scientific research, and a faint, fleeting glimpse of writing’s future.

Rethinks and retells the history of music in sixteenth-century Ferrara, putting women, of the court and convent, at the narrative centre.