The Art And Passion Of Guido Nincheri

Connoiseurs of stained-glass windows and frescoes have appreciated Guido Nincheri's unique work, which can be found across Canada and in New England. Although considered to have been the most prolific religious artist in North America, his work is not well known. The Art and Passion of Guido Nincheri provides intimate glimpses into the life story of this man of great artistic integrity, and introduces the reader--with 36 colour plates--to a sampling of the churches and non-religious buildings Nincheri decorated. They exemplify his ideals of beauty, decoration, and the public aspect of art. In addition to churches in Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Edmundston, and many other cities, Nincheri decorated Montreal's Château Dufresne Museum and the Roger Williams Museum of Natural History in Providence, Rhode Island. A native of Prato, Nincheri (1885-1973) trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites and the Italian Stile Liberty. The young artist and his new wife arrived in Montreal in 1913 by way of Boston on the eve of the outbreak of World War I. The author was privileged to have access to both family stories and the rich archival resources documenting the studio, business, and private life of the artist.

Following Antonietta and Loris's first kiss in the shadows of the Italian Alps barely a year after the end of the Second World War, the couple was divided by a distance far greater than could ever have been imagined. With Antonietta's family moving to Montreal, migration entered the couple's intimate worlds, stretching the distance between them from the two hundred kilometres separating Ampezzo and Venice to the ocean between Montreal and Venice. Throughout their transatlantic separation, the young lovers fervidly wrote each other until they were reunited in Canada in 1949. With Your Words in My Hands tells a story about love and migration as written and read, idealized and imagined, through daily correspondence. Sonia Cancian recovers a rare complete epistolary record of an immigrant experience defined by love and sustained in writing, translating the letters with deftness and an ear for the immediacy of emotion and longing they embody. Cancian gives context to these exchanges dating from the beginning of the largest migration movement from Italy to Canada, showing how love, frustration, fear, sadness, and empathy were palpable elements that inflected the quotidian – bureaucratic processes, employment, family life – and defined immigrant experience. For the countless couples whose love is fragmented by separation but woven together with envelopes and stamps, or onscreen in today's instant messaging, these letters remind us how the experience of distance and proximity, absence and presence, can be reconfigured within the world of intimate correspondence.

How often did our ancestors bathe? How often did they wash their clothes and change them? What did they understand cleanliness to be? Why have our hygienic habits changed so dramatically over time? In short, how have we come to be so clean? The Clean Body explores one of the most fundamental and pervasive cultural changes in Western history since the seventeenth century: the personal hygiene revolution. In the age of Louis XIV bathing was rare and hygiene was mainly a matter of wearing clean underclothes. By the late twentieth century frequent – often daily – bathing had become the norm and wearing freshly laundered clothing the general practice. Cleanliness, once simply a requirement for good health, became an essential element of beauty. Beneath this transformation lay a sea change in understandings, motives, ideologies, technologies, and practices, all of which shaped popular habits over time. Peter Ward explains that what began as an urban bourgeois phenomenon in the later eighteenth century became a universal condition by the end of the twentieth, touching young and old, rich and poor, city dwellers and country residents alike. Based on a wealth of sources in English, French, German, and Italian, The Clean Body surveys the great hygienic transformation that took place across Europe and North America over the course of four centuries.

The librarian walks the streets of her beloved Paris. An old lady with a limp and an accent, she is invisible to most. Certainly no one recognizes her as the warrior and revolutionary she was, when again and again she slipped into the Jewish ghetto of German-occupied Vilnius to carry food, clothes, medicine, money, and counterfeit documents to its prisoners. Often she left with letters to deliver, manuscripts to hide, and even sedated children swathed in sacks. In 1944 she was captured by the Gestapo, tortured for twelve days, and deported to Dachau. Through Epistolophilia, Julija Šukys follows the letters and journals—the “life-writing”—of this woman, Ona Šimaitė (1894–1970). A treasurer of words, Šimaitė carefully collected, preserved, and archived the written record of her life, including thousands of letters, scores of diaries, articles, and press clippings. Journeying through these words, Šukys negotiates with the ghost of Šimaitė, beckoning back to life this quiet and worldly heroine—a giant of Holocaust history (one of Yad Vashem’s honored “Righteous Among the Nations”) and yet so little known. The result is at once a mediated self-portrait and a measured perspective on a remarkable life. It reveals the meaning of life-writing, how women write their lives publicly and privately, and how their words attach them—and us—to life.

Our rational nature is to ask questions and to understand. We piece together childhood events, relationships, connection with nature, expressions of culture, and human fragility. What does it all mean? The collection of poems, Age of Innocence, starts off with childhood where the child is shielded from the world. The encounter with nature opens the path to metaphysical reflection while relations undergo reanalysis, reassurance, and rejection. Cultures may surprise and delight, but also confuse and disturb. What is the emotional “impact” over time? Innocence is progressively shattered as one discovers poverty, loneliness, and discrimination. The adult becomes the innocent “patient.” Is there refuge behind clinic doors? Fragmented, the person blurs reality and illusion and seeks healing.

Venice, 1769. The City of Masks is awash with rumour. A strange man haunts the nearby island of Torcello, a skeleton strapped to his back. A wolf wearing a priest’s cassock is spotted running through the fields. A mysterious courtesan bears signs of a most unusual form of stigmata. Michele Archenti, former priest and devil’s advocate, and current publisher of a scandalous collection of erotic poetry, becomes reluctantly embroiled in political intrigue. Called upon to defend the skeleton-bearer—his friend Rodolfo —against charges of heresy, Archenti must navigate the murky political waters as well as the less-frequented canals of Venice, and outsmart the ambitious new Inquisitor from Rome who vows not only to prosecute the heretic, but to see him burn. In the heady, uninhibited days of Carnival, the signs are ripe: the citizens of Venice prepare for the Second Coming of Christ.