Eloquent and assured, Mary McCarthy's The Stones of Florence beckons the reader on a brisk but sweeping tour of the birthplace of the Renaissance and the legendary home of the Medici, Dante, Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and other giants of the age. Her keen observations of this famously alluring city speak to Florence's persistent character and magnetism-and the attraction it exerted over the first major wave of American tourists to postwar Europe....

Follows the journey of the boy who would become the painter Fra Filippo. Growing up in Renaissance Florence, Filippo Lippi has a talent-- not only can he see the beauty in everything, he can capture it, paint it. But beauty and art cannot always feed you or protect you. To survive, this orphan, street urchin, budding rogue, must first become Fra Filippo Lippi: Carmelite friar, man of God. He will become a gambler, a forger, a seducer of nuns; and...

"A major figure of postwar European art and a binational resident of Argentina and Italy, Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) blurred numerous boundaries in his life and art, crossing borders both literally and figuratively. This volume takes a fresh look at the renowned artist whose simultaneous innovations in painting, drawing, ceramics, and sculpture, as well as his spatial explorations, pushed the painterly into the sculptural and redefined the relationship...